Oops! Found another extreme!

2) This is the question I cannot really answer. My conviction is Christian. I was raised Christian, left, and then decided that was the place to which I should return. I don’t think that there is an objective set of criteria for supernatural communication, simply because it doesn’t fall into a class of things that one can categorize and define. If it exists, it is unique. There are things that might impress me, such as extremely precise predictive prophecy, but even by the internal statements of the Bible, one can get a prediction right without getting everything else right.

So I don’t have a good answer to your question #2. It’s definable within the community and one would need to compare community to community, but again, I don’t know how to do that. It leads back to the old “leap of faith” thing, in a way.

The particular criteria on which I differed with Muslims was with two different Muslims who tried to convince me to convert. Each tried to tell me that one of the reasons the Qur’an could be identified as God’s word was that it provided a comprehensive answer to every question. Now one could debate both whether this is true, and secondly whether it correctly represents the view of Islam, but for each of these individuals it was quite convincing. I told them (2 separate occasions) that I didn’t find that a very attractive quality in a holy book. They were quite stunned.

Now I don’t deny that I could be wrong. Perhaps that is precisely the way God would communicate. But how would one demonstrate such a thing, or my own criteria either, for that matter?

Now this makes me even more curious. In particular:

1) What criteria do you use to identify a work as inspired (in the religious sense)? For example, if someone handed you a text and told you it was a newly-discovered book by one of the Gospel authors, how would you decide whether to treat it as the word of God? What advice would you give to a church that was considering including it in their canon?

2) If another religious group (e.g. Muslims) seem to use different criteria, is that a flaw in your criteria or in the other group’s? If it were your criteria that were flawed, how would you know?

On the matter of canon and inspiration, no, I do not equate being canonical with being inspired. I would suggest there are many more writings that are inspired but not canonical. Canonicity is, in my view, a community recognition of the value. I have never discovered a way of defending the concept of “canon” outside of a community, just as I don’t know how to define “inspired” in that way.

I have found, for example, that I simply don’t share an equivalent set of criteria for inspiration with those Muslims with whom I have discussed the issue. We can discuss pleasantly, but we really are not talking directly to one another.

Simply saying we would like the inspired writing to be “accurate” is not sufficient; there are too many variations, and too much depends on how one interprets.

In discussing canonization, we often fail to emphasize the fact that the body of believers that made the canon a formal canon was already using roughly those books. Why? I believe it is because they heard God speaking in them.

I’m curious: do you see “inspiredness” as a true/false quality or as more of a continuum?

This question is (ahem) inspired by the amount of variation in some of the early Biblical canons. Obviously the Gnostics, Ebionites, Marionites etc had their own versions (which presumably they felt were divinely inspired). And the Eastern canons were a bit of a mess for the first half-dozen centuries AD.

It occurs to me that this situation is only worrying if you think that there is a fixed list of inspired books. If any book can be inspired to a greater or lesser extent, the only question is which authors do best at getting out of the way and letting the Holy Spirit work.