[Another in the series of “Responding to Bumper Stickers,” or “Long Answers to Short Questions,” in which I try to give a Latter-day Saint response to a question or accusation commonly lobbed against us on X.]
This one began as an X conversation, and the background is germane, I think.
A sola scriptura Christian stated that the Book of Mormon contradicted the Bible.
I noted that, in several instances, the Bible contradicts itself.
He said that, no, I just don’t understand the Bible.
I brought out the standard list of contradictions in the Bible:
- Did Noah bring two of every animal, clean and unclean, into the ark, or was it seven clean and two unclean?
- Did Moses see God face-to-face, or has no one seen God at any time?
- Which genealogy of Joseph is accurate, the one in Matthew or the one in Luke?
- How did Judas Iscariot die?
- Did Paul’s companions see a light but hear no voice, or was it the other way around?
- Was there one angel in Jesus’ tomb, or two?
- Does God change His mind, or not?
A lot of these aren’t important (unless one tries to argue that the Bible is inerrant, but not really, but sort of). But others — have people seen God face-to-face or not? does God change His mind or not? — make a big difference.
He avoided answering the question with non-answers like, “Your understanding of the Bible is in error. Not the Bible. So it appears to you there are contradictions. It’s the same way with atheists and other religions. They think there are contradictions in the Bible but yet they don’t look into the context or take verses literally.” He then responded with a list of supposed contradictions between the Book of Mormon and the Bible.
I finally pinned him down, and he answered two of the instances above (how many of each animal in the ark, and whether anyone had seen God face-to-face) with common interpretive frameworks — for instance, that every instance of “seeing” God was in a vision or as a non-literal theophany, and therefore wasn’t a contradiction of John 1:18. (He skipped all of the others.)
Here, lightly edited to make it a more general statement for the blog than a response in an ongoing dialogue, is how I responded:
So, the bare text of the Bible contains apparent contradictions which a certain interpretation resolves — but the interpretation does so because the interpreter approaches the text of the Bible as a whole, believing that any contradictions are only apparent, and thus privileging any interpretation which resolves those apparent contradictions between parts of the whole.
However, if you were to have already accepted an interpretation as the basis of judgment which only encompassed one part of the Bible and judged a second part by your interpretation of that first part, you could easily find the second part wanting.
Hypothetically, let’s say you’re from some early Christian sect which only had the synoptic gospels and the epistle of James as the foundation of your doctrine, and then someone brought you the epistles of Paul. If you were to judge the Pauline materials in light of the doctrine you had interpreted from the synoptic gospels and James, you would say that Paul contradicts your scriptures. “Jesus said to keep His commandments, and James said faith without works is dead. Therefore, Paul’s statements which seem to contradict them mean that Paul is wrong.”
In general terms: If you treat Part A as a cohesive whole and the your interpretation of Part A as the standard against which you judge Part B, you will find Part B contradictory; whereas if you begin by accepting both Parts A and B and attempting to synthesize them, you will arrive at an interpretation that harmonizes both parts.
With me so far?
From where I’m sitting, sola scriptura Christians are doing much the same. Their Part A is the Bible, Part B is the Book of Mormon, and when Part B is judged against an interpretation that assumes that Part A is complete, you say what looks like contradictions.
Whereas I accept the Old Testament, New Testament and the Book of Mormon all as scripture, and thus my interpretive framework encompasses them all and resolves apparent contradictions between them. In the same way that apparent contradictions within the Bible don’t bother this sola scriptura Christian because he ultimately doesn’t see them as contradictory, the contradictions which this person listed between the Bible and the Book of Mormon don’t bother me because I ultimately don’t see them as contradictory.
And I suppose that my next post should go through his given list of contradictions, to demonstrate how an interpretive framework that encompasses Old and New Testaments and the Book of Mormon holds them to be without substantive* contradictions.
*I say “substantive” contradictions, because anything that’s filtered through the minds and languages of fallible man, no matter how inspired, will contain minor errors. (This is where I would put, say, the conflict between one gospel saying there was a single angel at Jesus’ tomb and another saying there were two; or whether Jesus was crucified in the third hour or sometime after the sixth hour. They’re a contradiction, and they can’t be reconciled — one can’t say that, maybe, there were one-and-a-half angels — but they’re also not important.)
There was, by the way, no response to the version of the above that I posted in our X conversation.