All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness. (2 Timothy 3:16)

The Bible Was Written By God Himself Though Men Whom He Guided Personally

Living Spiritual Teacher and “Progessive Christian” scholar Marcus Borg speculates [read: wishes] the Bible is not a divine product. By now the following quote from Rob Bell and his wife Kristen will be rather familiar to many of you who are concerned with the vital work of exposing heresy in your evangelical churches I am doing here at Apprising Ministries:

The Bells started questioning their assumptions about the Bible itself – “discovering the Bible as a human product,” as Rob puts it, rather than the product of divine fiat. “The Bible is still in the center for us,” Rob says, “but it’s a different kind of center. We want to embrace mystery, rather than conquer it.” (Online source, emphasis added)

Make no mistake, what Bell just said above is a tacit denial of the evangelical Protestant doctrine of the divine verbal plenary inspiration of Holy Scripture. Yes, in Bell’s timid and tentative “style” he attempts to obscure this with the statement, “the Bible is still the center.” But then Bell goes on to point out that he’s “discovering the Bible as a human product,…rather than the product of divine fiat.”

So despite  the statement, “The Bible is still in the center for us,… but it’s a different kind of center. We want to embrace mystery, rather than conquer it,” for Rob Bell to say he’s discovering the Bible as a human product rather than a divine one is, beyond all doubt, to undermine the veracity of Scripture. Bell’s use of the word “rather,” as in preference to, serves to elevate the human agency over the divine.  

And as  a result we would now be free to go on and interpret the Bible “in community,” so that in true neo-orthodox fashion we can then call only the parts which “speak” to us divinely inspired. Now with this spiritual cyanide in mind we consider the following quote from Marcus Borg, Fellow of the Christ-hating Jesus Seminar. This comes from his 1997 book The God We Never Knew:

The next step in my understanding of the Bible took place in seminary. There I let go of the notion that the Bible is a divine product. I learned that it is a human cultural product, the product of two ancient communities, biblical Israel and early Christianity. As such, it contained their understandings and affirmations, not statements coming directly or somewhat directly from God (25, emphasis mine).

Sound familiar? Yet this was written seven years before Rob Bell made his comment in Christianity Astray Today. It is interesting because we already know from Bell’s book Velvet Elvis that he is familiar with, and even recommends, the work of the panentheist Borg e.g. footnote 1 — “Marcus Borg explains this idea extremely well in his book The Heart of Christianity” (180).

In closing this for now, let’s read a bit more from Marcus Borg on his fatally flawed view of Holy Scripture. Here from The Heart of Christianity, in nearly identical language, is what Borg means by what he’s just told you above:

* The Bible is the product of two historical communities, ancient Israel and the early Christian movement.

* As such, it is a human product, not a divine product. This claim…sees the Bible as the response of these two ancient communities.

* As their response to God, the Bible tells us how they saw things… It is not God’s witness to God (not a divine product), but their witness to God.

* As a human product, the Bible is not “absolute truth” or “God’s revealed truth,” but relative and culturally conditioned…the Bible tells us how our spiritual ancestors saw things – not how God sees things.” (45, emphasis mine)

And then Borg again from his The God We Never Knew, which would be more accurately titled “The God I Do Not Know”:

As such [the Bible] contained their understandings and affirmations, not statements coming directly or somewhat directly from God. The creation stories in the book of Genesis were Israel’s stories of creation, not God’s stories of creation. I realized that whatever “divine revelation” and the “inspiration of the Bible meant (if they mean anything) they did not mean that the Bible was a divine product with divine authority (25, emphasis mine)

Really; and just how does Dr. Borg know all of this? Answer: He doesn’t. Can Dr. Borg prove any of this filthy spiritual bile? No, he cannot; and neither can any of the other fools so deluded as to think they can be in right standing with Jesus and deny His Word. Or do they not remember what Christ has said through His Spirit concerning Holy Scripture:

Your Word, O LORD, is eternal… for You have exalted above all things Your Name and Your Word…. Heaven and earth will pass away, but My Words will never pass away… All Scripture is God-breathed…no prophecy of Scripture came about by the prophet’s own interpretation. For prophecy never had its origin in the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit. (Psalm 119:89; 138:2; Mark 13:31; 2 Timothy 3:16; 2 Peter 1:20-21)

So what’s it going to take for you to awake?

See also:

ROB BELL IN A NUTSHELL: THE BIBLE

ROB BELL AND EMERGENCE CHRISTIANITY REJECT CARDINAL DOCTRINE OF SOLA SCRIPTURA

THROUGH ROB BELL “THE GREAT ENLIGHTED ONES” TELL US MAN HAS DIVINE GREATNESS

ROB BELL AND KARL BARTH

JOHN MACARTHUR: EXISTENTIAL NEO-ORTHODOXY DENIES SOLA SCRIPTURA

THE EMERGING CHURCH SOWING ITS NEO-ORTHODOX CONFUSION ON SCRIPTURE

BOB DEWAAY: EMERGENT CHURCH ASKS “HAS GOD SAID?”