Recently, Andrew P. (who, although no longer “Concordant,” is still a member of the body of Christ in my view, since he did believe Paul’s Gospel at one time, and very well might still) wrote an article explaining his current view on Scripture.
Now, at first glance, a lot of what he wrote in that article sounds mostly logical, and while I’m not going to discuss everything he wrote, I wanted to give a quick explanation of why I can’t come to the same conclusions he did.
To put it simply, if the Bible actually contradicts itself at all in its actual meaning (not referring to types of “contradictions” that can be resolved by understanding the difference between the two Gospels, of course), we can’t trust any of it to be true since we can’t know which parts are true and which aren’t. And if the Bible as a whole is true, there’s no way that the majority of the Christian (especially Orthodox and Catholic) doctrines can be true, as I believe my own eBook proves quite definitively (which is why I do think Andrew should re-read the whole book carefully). And if someone is going to say that we need to interpret the Bible based on the interpretations of the Catholic magisterium (or whatever the Orthodox equivalent of that is), since taking the context of the Bible as a whole into consideration completely contradicts their supposed interpretations — which I would argue aren’t actually interpretations at all, but are really just eisegesis, since there’s no actual way to get pretty much any of their doctrines out of the Bible if we’re assuming the Bible is inerrant, which means they have to be reading their doctrines into it instead — they might as well just throw the Bible out altogether and simply say their doctrines are simply based on some supposed apostolic chain of tradition (which is basically what they’re claiming anyway), because they have absolutely zero scriptural authority to base their doctrines on (which they don’t need anyway, as they claim to be the authority), especially since Scripture is really not only just superfluous to their authority and doctrines, but is actually a hindrance to them when it’s taken seriously.
To put it simply, they can’t refer us to Scripture as a basis for their authority (or, really, for any of their doctrines), since if Scripture is true, then Scripture as a whole contradicts basically everything they teach, and if Scripture as a whole isn’t true, we can’t trust any of it, and we then would have no reason to believe the parts they’re “interpreting” as the basis of their authority and doctrines are even true to begin with. So as logical as their bibliological — and even their epistemological — claims might seem to be at first glance, these claims have irreconcilable problems, at least as far as I can tell.