At small group tonight we took a break from our regularly schedule programming – the seven deadly sins – to talk about a question that had come up in previous discussions. Two of my guys have to write eighteen one-page papers on different apparent contradictions in the Bible, so they asked me some questions about contradictions.

Big picture stuff, right?

We briefly talked about the three different types of contradiction:

Explicit Contradiction – such as, “it is raining outside” and “it is not the case that it is raining outside.” That’s an explicit contradiction.
Formal Contradiction – a formal contradiction is when you’re given a set of premises and using only the laws of logic you can deduce an explicit contradiction. For example, “Socrates is a man,” “All men are mortal,” and “Socrates is immortal.” Using only the laws of logic we can make an explicit contradiction out of these statements. That’s formal contradiction.
Implicit Contradiction – an implicit contradiction is when using the laws of logic and some other necessary truth we can derive and explicit contradiction. For instance, “the sky is blue” and “the sky is red” are only an implicit contradiction if we accept the premise, “it cannot be the case that the sky is both blue and red at the same time and in the same way.”

So, why exactly is that stuff important? Because often people will throw out the charge that the Bible is “full of contradictions.” If we’re going to have an intelligent conversation with people who make such claims, we’ve got to know exactly what a contradiction is. A contradiction isn’t simply two statements that are hard to reconcile. We can take Paul’s “saved by grace” and James’ “justified by works” and call them a contradiction (as many do), but they only qualify as implicit contradictions, and then only if we define “saved” and “justified” in the same way. That would be the necessary truth that we’d need to add, which isn’t that easy to defend.

In other words, the burden of proof rests on the one who claims they’re contradictory, not on the person who says they can be reconciled. Another good example is the death of Judas. Matthew 27:5 says that Judas hanged himself. Acts 1:18 says that Judas fell in a field and his body burst open. Is this a contradiction? It is only an (implicit) contradiction if we assume that the two verses cannot be reconciled. But obviously, that begs the question. If, however, we can come up with even one plausible explanation for the two, e.g., that Judas hanged himself, after which the rope broke and his body fell and split open, then we’ve showed that there is no actual contradiction there.

The point of the whole discussion was to communicate that the Bible can be trusted. Some may say there are contradictions in the Bible, but upon further examination they prove to not hold up to the definition of a contradiction.