Do you believe that the Bible is the Word of God?  

Forgetting for now theories of inspiration, the various traditions funding our received texts, historical form criticism, and various definitions and nuances of "the word of God"...and anything else!

The question here merely seeks to isolate the phenomenon of "belief" : Why do you believe that the Bible is the inspired word of God?

If you answer, " I believe because of the authority of the Church" one rightly must follow, "And why do you believe in the authority of the Church?"

If you answer, " Because Jesus founded it! ", then one must rightly ask " Why do you believe that?" 

You can not justify your belief in the authority of the Church at this juncture by appealing to the authority of the Bible without involving  yourself in a crass circularity and infinite regress.

 ........................................................................................

Is your belief in the Bible the conclusion of a rational proof or argument? If so, make the case!

Is your belief in Jesus Christ as Messiah, Son of God, based on your belief in the Bible - say, it's "authoritative testimony"? If so, do you realize the circularity and question begging nature of all this ?

Is your belief in the Incarnation, Resurrection, Real Presence, and the sacraments au generale...is this rational; a conclusion of an argument or proof ? Make the case without a circular ( see above) reference to Bible or Church !

 ................................................................................

Now, it is fascinationg that "belief" in the supernatural nature and tenets of Christianity has nothing whatever to do with reason. 

One giant of philosophy and Christian theology writing in the 18th C. was bothered not in the least by any of this and, in fact, argued that the test of genuine "religiousness" and "faith" consisted in a criterionless transition or "leap" from history { to be read as " finite events"} to  "belief" in the Eternal One and in the Absolute Paradox.  

.................Take your best shot........................ 

It does take faith.  But I can relate (briefly as I'm supposed to go to bed!) my own experience or reason, if you will.

I believe the Bible is the Word of God because the Catholic Church says so.

I believe the Catholic Church has the authority of God to speak the Truth and nothing but the Truth because Christ founded it.

I believe Christ founded the Church because it makes absolutely no sense to me that He would come to this earth and found a Church and then leave it open to error, regardless of how sinful each human being is.

I believe that Christ is that powerful.  If not, then why bother believing in Him? 

For me, it really boiled down to this.  Either I was going to be Catholic, or I should look into some other non-Christian religion (or none at all).  And that is where the FAITH element comes in. 

ipoch and wljewell : I regret to inform you, but your answers are

 entirely circular and question begging. Thus, we know no more of why

you believe the Bible than when we first posed the question! 

Review my post very carefully, and you immediately will understand,  

hopefully, that your proffered justification, " I believe the Bible is the

Word of God because the Church says it is." simply begs the question.

Because we now must ask, " And upon what warrant do you grant

 authority to the Church?"

And if you now answer either [1] because of the authority of the Biblical

 picture, or [2] because of the authority of Christ we still must now ask,  

" Upon what warrant do you regard either of these as authority?  

 Do you not see the circularity here ?

 You believe the Bible on the authority of the Church, you say,and the

authority of the Church derives from the authority of Christ ...but what warrants your belief in the authority of Christ?

 To reiterate : Where does your belief in the authority of Christ from?

You can't say, "From what I read of Christ in the Bible. He is called

Messiah and Son of God..."  because it is authority of the Bible that is

 at issue here. And neither can say you say that the Bible is authority

because the Church says it is, since we want to know what warrrants

your belief in the authority of the Church! 

 .

"Round and round we go....   ! 

Think why do you believe in all this? Is there a good non-circular and non-question begging answer?

noelfitz,

You said what I was going to say (only you said it better)!

Jesus, the second person of the Trinity, is the Word.  Sacred Scripture (the Bible) is definitely an important part of this revealed Truth, but it is certainly not the Word of God in the entirety of His revelation to mankind.

As to the "why" the answer must be the same as to why one believes anything. Because it's true.

Sophistry?

Why do you believe you are not just a brain in a large petri dish being fed stimuli to simulate everything you perceive as reality?

Indeed, we can reduce ourselves to sophistry here.

To Everyone: You can not invoke an other authority as the basis for your belief in the issue at large. Very simple. That is circular. We then simply return the favor, so to speak, and ask the same question of that authority!

Lpioch is doing what Kierkegaard calls the "muscular" attempt at making the transition from the quanitative to the qualitative { Kierkegaard} in basing belief in Bible on something else that supposedly would warrant such a that belief in Bible, viz. Lpioch's "faith in Christ."

 Now let's ask Lipoch what precisely warrants his/her faith in Christ? And let's further ask whether faith in Christ can be used to warrant belief in Bible as the  Word of God considering Christ made mention only of the OT.( obviously.) 

Iwall

You ask tough questions.

What is faith?

You also ask:

Is faith's first moment and its perduring sine qua non radically subjective?

I see the OED defines perdure as:

intr. To continue, endure; to persist; to last forever.

Eg . 1993 Latin Mass (Special ed.) 24/2 The ‘character’ of Holy Orders perdures in more ways than one.

To this all I can say is I haven’t a clue.

To a Catholic and a Protestant faith means different things.

To the Catholic faith is a theological virtue by which we accept the truths of our faith. To the Protestant it is an acceptance of God, closer to what we would consider as hope. It can be considered objectively (God is the object of our faith, God is faithful) or subjectively (we believe) (see below).

The Catholic Encyclopaedia seems to have it all ways:

(Pistis, fides). In the Old Testament, the Hebrew means essentially steadfastness, cf. Exod., xvii, 12, where it is used to describe the strengthening of Moses' hands; hence it comes to mean faithfulness, whether of God towards man (Deuteronomy 32:4) or of man towards God (Ps. cxviii, 30). As signifying man's attitude towards God it means trustfulness or fiducia. It would, however, be illogical to conclude that the word cannot, and does not, mean belief or faith in the Old Testament for it is clear that we cannot put trust in a person's promises without previously assenting to or believing in that person's claim to such confidence. Hence even if it could be proved that the Hebrew does not in itself contain the notion of belief, it must necessarily presuppose it. But that the word does itself contain the notion of belief is clear from the use of the radical, which in the causative conjugation, or Hiph'il, means "to believe", e.g. Gen., xv, 6, and Deut., i, 32, in which latter passage the two meanings -- viz. of believing and of trusting -- are combined. That the noun itself often means faith or belief. (http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/05752c.htm).

Does this help?

Noelfitz: Thanks for your considered response. This is a very tricky topic.

I am trying slowly to wade us some distance into the depths of Kierkegaard. As he showed by his own style of "indirect communication", faith as a psychological reality can not be exhaustively or "directly  communicated."

 It is, acc. to Kier., owing to the very nature of faith as "leap' that it can not be directly communicated.

Nor can faith - when discussed as a psychological reality - be profitably seen as a theological virtue by which we come to accept... For it is that the capacity of the human being to accept such offensive doctrine, that is, "offensive to the human understanding", presupposes faith!

 In fact, according to Kierkegaard, we rob faith of its passion and pathos when we all too humanly seek to "quantify" or account for faith as belief in propositions which ultimately dismantles the dialectical dynamics of faith into a belief in { Church} propositions. A confusion of qualitative and quantitative. 

Faith, acc. to K, must perdure as a tension of "infinite interestedness", that is, in living in the tension of  having and not having {the certainty} of conceptual and dogmatic posits. Rather, faith involves a  "letting go" of the very desire to cling to the [illusory] certainty of dogma and propositions as its grounding moment. 

Faith -in order to be faith- must first and continuosly be this "letting go" ( "letting go" is one facet of K. meaning of "leap" of faith) and be joyfull at having reached the boundaries of "theoretical and quantitative reason".

This "letting go" is what permits the transition from history to eternity. Yet, it is not merely a tough decision made by one's will. It is, acc. to K., more in the manner of a Gestalt switch by which it { my new self understanding as absolutely related to and interested in the Absolute - Kierkegaard's words.} all comes into clear view and focus! I am a radically qualitatively different being thereby.

I do not wish to take this further at this time. This little bit of Kierkegaard - a very difficult thinker to grasp -  is quite enough to digest but much worth the effort I think.  

In the Bible as in no other book we find the meaning of our own lives.  Dr. Scott Hahn wrote a wonderful book, Understanding the Scriptures: A Complete Course on Bible Study.  Dr. Hahn gets the reader very well acquainted with the word “covenant.”  God’s covenant with humanity defines the “story line” that holds all of Scriptures together, from the beginning to end.  God’s covenant encompasses the meaning and the means of our salvation.  That is why the Bible’s “story line” is called salvation history.  The story of Sacred Scripture turns on the life of one person: Jesus Christ.  He is the Messiah promised, expected and prayed for in the Old Testament.  In the New Testament He is the Savior come to fulfill all those hopes.  Jesus unites the two testaments and makes them one book, one Bible.

“Yet, Jesus himself never wrote a book.  Instead he established a Church to bring salvation to every generation, through His sacraments and His teaching.  That is very good news for us.  Maybe the most important thing to learn is how important the Church is in our understanding of the Bible.  Read the last chapter of St. Luke’s Gospel.  Jesus Himself most clearly and powerfully “opened” the Scriptures only in the context of the “breaking of the bread”-what we know today as the Mass, the Eucharist or the Liturgy.  That’s where we disciples continue to “know Him” and grow in our understanding of the Holy Bible.”

A very significant group of Bible scholars, the Pontifical Biblical Commission, recently wrote: “it is above all through the liturgy that Christians come into contact with scripture…In principle the liturgy, and especially the sacramental liturgy, the high point of which is the Eucharistic celebration, brings about the most perfect actualization of the biblical texts…Christ is then present in his word, because it is He Himself who speaks when sacred scripture is read in the Church” (Sacrosanctum concilium 7).  Written text thus become living work.”  And that, my friend, is why Catholics believe the Bible is the Word of God.

mkocahn: I hope to get my "ENTER" key right.

I respectfully disagree with you , and so does Kierkegaard. Of course, K.

has his critics. We may attempt to toss him out I suppose. But it would

be quite a task and a great loss to do so.

All of what you say about believing because we believe in the apostolic

testimony, I am sorry, is indeed circular. Tantamount to saying, " I

believe because they believe, and what they believe is true thus I believe. "

But why attribute apostolic faith as the cause of your own movement of

soul, something as a movement of your own soul alone can do? 

Besides, as K. voluminously argues, no genuine faith - understood as a

perspicuous movement or "transition' of the soul and, especially, as a

passionate self-inwardness and qualitative move towards the Absolute -

can possibly come about by my gesturing to you about anyone else's

testimony or witness. Don't misconstrue my meaning here. I with

Kierkegaard am focusing on the psychology of this "isolated" transition

of soul or "leap called faith without which nothing else matters.

While Apostolic faith greatly buttresses my faith, and perhaps readies

the soul for transition to an important extent, the leap itself, that is,

 my qualitative inward appropriation of the Absolute Paradox, my belief

and "passionate interest" in this absurd picture ( absurd to human

reason) of the God-man etc. can not be made to happen in me or you

simply and solely because I first believe in another's belief.

Such 'others's testimony' serves an important prepping function for the

soul's eventual "transition", yes.  But in itself does not because can not

make it [ "it" = leap/transition/ giving oneself over] happen inside me.

Invoking testimony of another, as cause of my movement of soul - falls

limp upon the ground unless one at the same time undergoes that

necesaary transition from the historical/quantitative to the

infinite/qualitative. Again, K. insists that this unique movement is

radically subjective and isolated/inward. It can not be accounted for by 

 belief in the belief/testimony of another. We could use a lot more of

Kierkegaard in the Church.

If you are not familiar with Kierkegaard, perhaps it is informative to

recall the mileu in Copenhagen which Kierkegaard was critiquing. The

same elements of banal faith and what K. calls " religious ventriloquism"

- which is not faith at all for K.-  and rendering lip service to the

life of faith while mouthing detached "politically correct" Church

precepts ... devoid of a passionate, individual appropriation...these

featues Kierkegaard felt constituted a virtual religious crisis 

and necessitated a massive religious/philosophical /cultural reform. The

Church has seen this all along, and refers to the importance of

our continual conversion and refers to " the conversion of the baptized."

I am not aware of any Catholic theologians having originated the same

penetrating existential/psychological analysis as the Dane,

but certainly many Catholic scholars as well as Paul Tillich have

rightly been drawn to him.  Thanks.     

mkocahn: I am glad the enter key helps. I believe u lack an interest in

K. and that's fine with me. It is contrary to K. to see him as advocating

 an intellelctual assent. Such is inimical to and can not generate the

moment of faithand transition K.is most concerned to rescue faith from

its intellectual distortion. He is all about inwardness, subjectivity, and

personal appropriation. Your own last few senttnves, ironically, say

much the same thing as K. However, K. and myself hold to denying that

 you believe in the apostlic testimony and that that belief is the initial

 and proximate cause of your faith. Rather, you believe in their

testimony only because you have already been "spiritually spiraled

upwards" as you put it. However, another's testimony can not cause

one's own appropriation and subjectivity of faith. You did say that you

believed on the basis of apostolic testimony which is exactly what K and

 many others  deny is even possible.That's all. No matter.

I  see you as much more Kierkegaardian than you see yourself. Thanks.

I do dig Kirkregard.  I do not have the neccessary intelect to hold as true and real his thoughts for more than a few minutes.  His depth is incredible and beautiful.  I really like his discussion of the faith of Abraham to sacrifice his son.  He really brought me to a crisis of faith and understanding of God.  But, I cannot keep up with the discussion or the thoughts that great intellects light up.  I can witness the brightness and see the beauty.  But I cannot stand next to them, apply my mind and keep up with them.  I fall in my own limited mind.

So, when asked this deep question: Do you believe that the Bible is the Word of God?  I can reply as myself, with all my weakness and limited intellect.  It will be the truth and not very deep but will express my real thoughts on the matter.

I believe that the Bible is the Word of God because I was taught about Jesus by my parents who loved me.  Their love and care was, in retrospect, sweet and unending and more than I deserved.  In a way, they taught me about God through their love even before they mentioned Jesus or the Catholic faith.  But, I remember going to Catholic Church on Sundays and weekdays with my mom even before I was told about Jesus.  I lived inside the arms of the Church because my parents loved me and the Chruch was part of that experience.

They loved me and brought me to see that goodness was best and Jesus love was more even than their love.  They told me God loved me more than they loved me.

(By the way my parents also told me that Santa Claus brings presents on Christmas day and that the Easter Bunny brought candy on Easter.  But, later they fessed up and told me that SC and the EB were all made up and they were the ones who gave us kids that stuff.)

I prayed with my parents and my family.  We said unGodly amounts of prayers.  I walked in processions.  I dressed up for Church and smelled incense.  I loved it.

Eventually I went beyond the faith and knowledge of my parents about Jesus.  I heard about Him from teachers, Priests, sisters, brothers, friends, books.  I came to understand that the Bible was God's story and  God's word.  Eventually I read the Bible and absorbed the Bible.  I have heard the bible stories repeated in Church.  I have heard the Bible referenced in literature and in B movies and in commercials.  I have seen the Bible used as a weapon to prove people wrong.  I have seen the Bible divide Christians and Catholics.  I have seen the media downplay the Bible and others use it against the media.  I have read Theologians who say the Bible is not historically accurate at all.  I have read those who say it is literal.  I know the Bible is the most sold book of all time.  Most families I know have at least one Bible.

I was not there when the different books in the Bible were composed.  Most of the books do not identify the author.  When it comes down to it, I am not sure where all the power of the Bible comes from.  Many people say many differnt things.  But, slowly over time, upon reading it, I am making it my own.  I do feel God in the Bible but not as much as I feel Him in the Eucharist, in other people, in the Church and in nature and history itself.  I meet God in my kids, my family, friends, doctors, ... people.

I really feel God in the New Testament - but that is because it is about Christ.  I know Jesus more than all the other people in the Bible.  His teachings are beautiful and full of ultimate goodness.  At the same time though, there are parts of the Old Testament that speak to me deeply.  (Jeremiah, Ezekial, Genesis, Sirach, Ecclesiasteses, Psalms)  I have experienced portions of God through the Old and New Testaments.  And I can say that the Bible is the Word the God but it does not give me direct love.  It does not give me my faith as much as other things, so that I feel like yelling out GOD IS THE BIBLE AND I COULD JUST EAT IT UP AND FIND HIS SPIRIT AND GOODNESS DIRECTLY IN THE BIBLE.

I guess what the Bible does provide is a universal (can I say Catholic) experience for the literate people of God.  It unifies us with written words and puts a stake in the ground.  And much of it talks about God in cryptic ways.  It is written words, language put in some kind of order in an attempt to provide a story of God.  God talks through others to us in the Bible.  But, unlike living faith, the Bible must be read and interpretted first before it is experienced as God.  We are the living stones and without us, the Bible is a mass of paper with squiggles, even if God wrote it.  We provide the Bible with its power by placing our trust and understanding in it.  It is not God Himself, like the Eucharist or the Church.

Sorry about the length of this post and I am sorry it doesn't answer the question in a non circular fashion.

GK - God is good!