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**This article is too shallow and biased to be helpful.** - drstevej

** Maybe shallow for your educational and experiential levels. But for many, just digging into this subject, the article brings forth some valid points. ** - Salvation

Truth is helpful. The junk posted above is laughable, and highly misleading. Skipping over the character attacks in the first part, I'll look to the beef of the article to point out some of his mistakes:

(1) "But fundamentalists are usually reluctant to emphasize or even admit the human side of the Bible's authorship." "They fail to see that it's an even greater miracle for God to have authored the Bible without effacing the human authors."

My Response: You will find loonies as so described in both protestant and Catholic churches, but the VAST majority in both never deny the human Biblical authors' distinctive qualities in their writings. This type of generalization of the few to the many is quite common in this article, and obviously meant to discredit the truth without having to actually address it.

(2) "Fundamentalists believe the Bible was inspired ..., but they often think of this process the way a Moslem believes Allah dictated the Koran to Mohammed -word for word. Fundamentalists believe in "plenary (total) and verbal [word-for-word] inspiration."

Kreeft evidently does not understand plenary and verbal inspiration. One prominent Protestant work upholding these doctrines is "THE CHICAGO STATEMENT ON BIBLICAL INERRANCY" found at: http://www.iclnet.org/pub/resources/text/history/chicago.stm.txt

It clearly states the following:

**** Start of Quote
Article VII.

We affirm that inspiration was the work in which God by His Spirit, through human writers, gave us His Word. The origin of Scripture is divine. The mode of divine inspiration remains largely a mystery to us.

We deny that inspiration can be reduced to human insight, or to heightened states of consciousness of any kind.

Article VIII.

We affirm that God in His work of inspiration utilized the distinctive personalities and literary styles of the writers whom He had chosen and prepared.

We deny that God, in causing these writers to use the very words that He chose, overrode their personalities.
**** End of Quote

Furthermore, Kreeft provides us with this Jewel:

"There were some minor errors in copying, for the earliest texts we have don't totally agree with each other"

I will address this separately as it deserves it's own discussion.

(3) "For example, when a biblical poet speaks of "the four corners of the earth" he's reflecting the common ancient Hebrew belief that the earth is flat; yet his point is not the shape of the earth but the glory of God."

Please. Most people should be readily aware that Protestants aren't jumping around yelling that the earth is flat, or that the sun circles the earth just because the Bible uses such descriptive language. Why would Kreeft be implying that "Fundamentalists" either haven't, can't, or don't deal with such trivial issues?

(4) ...

There is so much straw here, it's hard to know where to start. Let's try this way:

**The fundamentalist insists he needs no Church to interpret Scripture**

No, the fundamentalist insists that the Holy Spirit uses the Church to interpret and understand the Scriptures. The Church, however, is not the ultimate authority over scripture, but rather is judged by the very scripture it supports.

I will not go into any detail refuting his poor arguments, as my main point of this post is to show his misrepresentation of the Protestant beliefs.

(5) "Many Protestant denominations began in an authoritative fundamentalism and slid into. a most unauthoritative Modernism."

Yup. Modernism has had it's toll on many portions of the Roman Catholic church as well. It's an ugly beast that we both agree should be destroyed.

(6) "The weakest plank in the fundamentalist's platform is surely his insistence on a literal interpretation..."

The weakest plank in your article is your insistence that protestants believe this ridiculous stuff. It has already been shown that the hermeneutic employed by most Protestants is more complex than the simplistic form proposed by Kreeft, so I'll skip the explanation.

(7) "If we had half their passion for our great creed that they have for their small one, we could win the world."

I skipped over the rehash of the literal stuff and jumped straight to this whopper. I'm actually quite glad that Kreeft reduces Protestants to such imbecilic yet enthusiastic drones. It makes the conversion of Catholics to Protestantism such an easier task when they come in expecting simple-minded "Jesus-freaks", and actually find a deeply-rooted tradition of theology that focuses on exactly what we are supposed to: Jesus Christ as our Lord and Savior.

Again, Thank you Kreeft for your help.