The first thing I’d like to note is that we can confidently show our non-inerrant (can anyone think of a better term than “errant”?) Bible as something that points to God. The Bible, if nothing else, points to God, but this obviously stops well shy of “proving” Him or anything about Him. But what the commenter is getting at is the inerrantist’s uneasiness with the fact that we have no official “last word” source text whose very existence will elicit compulsory belief from the doubter to whom it is presented. This is, in effect, what the inerrantist holds the Bible to be: you must believe because the Bible says so.

In actuality, I doubt very many reasonable people become Christians solely because they have been persuaded that the Bible is inerrant. They become convinced by what it says, and this may or may not suggest to them that the whole thing is absolute, crystalized divine perfection. We don’t need to be assured of inerrancy in order to make good use of a newspaper, but our confidence may be boosted by its consistent accuracy.

Telling an unbeliever, “Accept Christ as Lord, just as the Bible says,” is not itself dependent on inerrancy at all. Laying aside any questions about the value of proselytism, rejection of inerrancy itself does not undermine it in principle, although it does underscore the invalidity of one common tactic.  I think it no less likely (and more probable, in fact) that I might convince someone to adopt my faith if I told him that…

(1a) the Bible was written by ancient witnesses who believed Jesus was Lord, and that

(2a) I’ve found that to be true in my life and seen it at work in others’ lives

…than if I tried to convince him that…

(1b) the Bible is 100% perfect because it and I say it is,

(2b) Q.E.D., Jesus has been proved Lord.

(3b) Oh, and I’ve found that to be true in my life and seen it at work in others’ lives.

If they find one error in Scripture, or even just one difficulty without a plausible answer, they’ll be obligated by sound reasoning to declare (1b) unsatisfied and chuck (2b) without a second thought about (3b). In other words, when they ask, “Why should I believe your Bible?”, which puts a more significant strain on credulity? “Because it’s perfect, which proposition I accept because it says so about itself,” or “Because it works, and has yielded extraordinary results for believers and for society as a whole throughout the centuries”?

The inerrancy doctrine has been used more than anything else as a blunt object to decisively “prove” Christianity. But only the young or gullible come to accept Christianity based upon that. Too many Fundamentalists and evangelicals feel as though they have to prove the Bible’s perfection so that their faith will be “proved” as well. But we don’t need proof of its inerrancy; we need evidence of its usefulness and its reliability. Even if we don’t consider the Bible to be any more indicative of actual events in the times they describe than historians assume for the uninspired, non-inerrant, but sincere works of Josephus, Tacitus, or Julius Caesar, we still have something to reckon with.  And for all my rejection of inerrancy, I find it an unmotivated leap to also reject its adequacy for leading us to the formative and definitive stages of our faith’s history, from which starting point we and the Church throughout history have gone on to encounter the truth of God in Christ.

Related posts:

1. Brief question about inerrancy
2. Inerrancy: A Snowball’s Chance
3. Thinking “Outside the Box” about the Bible

If you answer that Scripture is the foundation of our beliefs, you must also believe that even our beliefs about the Bible should be scriptural, free from the impositions of man’s so-called wisdom. Please tell me then, inerrantists, where you can find in Scripture that the Bible, meaning the canon as canonized by the Catholic Church, is inerrant.

Experience tells me that I will be directed to 2 Timothy 3.16-17. But this won’t work for multiple reasons. Number one, it’s only talking about the OT at best, since there was no “all Scripture” apart from the OT at the time it was written. Do you want to argue (as someone I know has) that this applies to the NT because 2 Peter apparently calls Paul’s writings “scripture” (Gk. graphe)? Laying aside the fact that graphe is the typical word for “writing” in Greek and not Scripture with a capital “s”, we have the significant issue of 2 Tim. not actually saying “inerrant”, “no errors”, “perfect”, “the very words of God” or anything approaching it; therefore, “inerrancy” is man’s imposition on the actual text of Scripture. What will happen here is that the inerrantist will claim that “inspired”/”God-breathed” means “error-free”, because God cannot lie. But this is where man’s wisdom comes in: the Bible nowhere says that “God-breathed” means “God dictated”, and no one except for an unhinged Fundamentalist claims the Bible is actually divine dictation, so they then must come up with the idea that God insured the accuracy of the perceptions of those to whom He revealed truth in Scripture. This is pure human speculation. It is not in Scripture. It is an extrapolation based upon man’s wisdom that has no biblical support. Therefore, the inerrantists’ belief system is based not upon Scripture, but upon the human philosophical proposition that God wouldn’t let authors of Scripture misinterpret any truth pertaining to science, history, or theology. Sure, it’d make sense for that to be the case, but it’s just not there in the Bible, and it violates no Scripture to believe that God’s inspiration entailed something a little less extravagant.

If they can think of no other prooftexts to produce, this is the part where they will change the subject and start talking about how the world will come crashing down around us if we throw inerrancy out. “How can we know what’s true and what’s not?” “We’ll all become self-serving Hitler apologists if we don’t have an absolutely inerrant witness from God Himself.” But need I say again that what this stuff amounts to is “man’s wisdom” about Scripture rather than any claim it makes for itself? That’s not to say it’s incorrect reasoning, but it’s certainly not sola scriptura – it’s depending on man’s reasoning to invalidate man’s reasoning. And it’s bad reasoning at that, for it depends on the argumentum ad consequentiam, the appeal to consequences. However undesirable the consequences, I’m personally committed to pursuing the truth.

So how about it? Can you point me to any Scriptures that dictate outright (and it must be outright, since weaving this and that passage together by logical train of thought is the work of the wisdom of man) that the Bible is inerrant or infallible?

Related posts:

1. Thinking “Outside the Box” about the Bible
2. Inerrancy vs. Infallibility
3. Inerrancy: A Snowball’s Chance

I strongly suggest that you go over to Outside the Box and read it. But in case you’re too lazy, and because it so well expresses my own current thoughts, I’m going to reproduce a substantial part of it right here.

My friends who read the Bible as if it were the very inspired words of God see themselves as standing on the solid high ground of Fundamentalism, and see me as skidding down the slippery slope of that dreaded disease of Liberalism.

My detractors consider their beliefs to be orthodox, and mine to be aberrant. They are correct, of course, if by orthodox, they mean “traditionally accepted”. But orthodox (ortho = right, doxa = opinion) simply means “the correct view.” To claim that only a verbally inspired–inerrant–infallible–literalist view of Scripture is orthodox involves a good deal of presupposition. That is, it must be correct before it can be truly orthodox.

What if the correct view of Scripture is that it is not the inerrant, verbally inspired “Word of God”? What if the orthodox, correct view, is that it is an accurate journal of an historic people of faith, written by human beings, subject to their errors and misconceptions, but recording for our benefit their quest to know the Living God? If that is the case, then we should expect to find within its pages a rich heritage of growing, developing understandings about God; but we should also expect to find mistakes, discrepancies, contradictions, and a variety of other inaccuracies. And this is exactly what we do find!

Perhaps it is time for those of us with a less rigid view of the Bible to boldly declare our view to be orthodox! If my view is, in fact, more orthodox (as I believe it is!) then the less orthodox view of Inerrancy is both dangerous and misleading. This, I believe, is the case.

Inerrancy leads to distortions of the character of God. Sometimes, horrendous distortions. A few examples should suffice: In an inerrant Bible, God becomes one who endorses the practice of selling one’s daughters as sex-slaves (Exodus 21:7-11). The God of the Inerrantist commands that children who sass or stubbornly disobey their parents are to be killed for their transgressions (Leviticus 20:9, Deuteronomy 21:18-21). If God were speaking through Moses in the pages of Numbers 31:9-18, then God followed the pattern of many military conquerors, rewarding soldiers with virgins for their sexual indulgence (or please, Inerrantist, explain what else is going on in these verses!). The God of the Inerrantist was, on occasion, confused about biology, as when he identified rabbits as ruminants in Deuteronomy 14:7. Furthermore, an Inerrantist must view God as sometimes raging out-of-control, one who had to be talked out of venting his rage upon the Israelite nation by the cooler-headed Moses (Exodus 32:7-14). This list could be expanded. We haven’t even ventured beyond the first five books! But my point should be clear by now. Inerrancy is dangerous to a healthy view of God and his character. It leads to theological confusion and distortion.

On the other hand, if we understand these stories to be of human origin, expressing the views of Moses and his contemporaries, we understand these misconceptions to reflect an understanding of God in its infancy; we can excuse Moses as a human being who was in the process of getting to know his Creator, and who was inspired to record what he was learning, complete with theological misconceptions and factual errors.

There is much more in the original post, and he asks some good questions at the end. Do check it out!

Related posts:

1. Brief question about inerrancy
2. The Bible made flesh
3. The Bible as literature and what that means to us

The reason the Reformation Party was scheduled for Halloween week is quite natural: October 31st is not only Halloween but also Reformation Day, the day in 1517 that Martin Luther nailed the Ninety-Five Theses on the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences to the door of the Wittenburg church, launching the Reformation. When I found out about the party, I good-naturedly smiled and rolled my eyes that our proudly Protestant church would put this on. I am not near so proud of the Reformation as some, and haven’t held a particularly high regard for Luther since undergraduate school. He was a crass and divisive figure, and as such has set the tone for the fractious nature of Protestantism. Aside from disagreeing with Luther’s critiques of some of the Church’s doctrine and practices, the Church also feared that delivering the Scriptures into the hands of non-clergy would result in a myriad competing theologies based upon a plethora of interpretations of Sacred Scripture. In this, they were absolutely correct.

Indeed, I have said on many occasions that I have more sympathy for the Catholic perspective than a lot of my Protestant brothers and sisters do. But Sunday night as my blindfolded son groped around in an attempt to “pin the Ninety-Five Theses on the Wittenberg door”, I felt more of a kinship with Martin Luther than ever before.

As much as they look up to Martin Luther’s courage in standing against a stalwart establishment intent on preserving what it believed was the very truth of God, the affinity of evangelicals with the Church of Rome is striking. It is true that the list of things they require “good” Christians to be in lockstep about is a different, much smaller list than that of the Church. But Luther’s dissent sprang from his conviction that our theology must be based upon Scripture correctly interpreted, no matter whose interpretation might be ousted as a result.

This last week I have had more conversations than ever with friends concerned about my rejection of inerrancy and the reading of Genesis as literal history. Some of my friends’ comments have had an adversarial bent, and I have actually undergone something reminiscent of excommunication by one of them that I’ve known the longest. No, they don’t want to burn me at the stake, but their indignation at my rejection of their interpretation is not at all dissimilar at its source. When I look at the tight formation of the Reformed system within Calvin’s lifetime and the unwritten list of interpretations thought to be untouchable by the evangelical community now centuries later, it seems that Protestantism never did fully embrace the notion that ecclesiastical authority must be subject to an accurate reading of Scripture. Instead, they simply changed from Rome being the ecclesiastical authority to whatever is popular and commonly accepted by their church leadership and culture. Evangelicalism, not a board of authoritative bishops but an assembly of common assumptions, is no less wont to throw someone like me out for demanding an honest treatment of Scripture on its own terms than was Rome.

A famous slogan associated with the Reformation since before the beginning of the 18th century was Ecclesia reforma semper reformanda: “The Church reformed, always reforming (lit. ‘to be reformed’).” Hilariously, I’ve seen some of the Reformed up at arms against this slogan, to the effect of, “You can’t fix perfection.” But delusions aside, is this not a worthy goal for all of us? We don’t have to reevaluate every single thing we believe on a yearly basis, or even once every few decades. But anyone who claims to love the truth and is intellectually coherent enough to acknowledge that the Church has been wrong once or twice about even major issues should be humble enough to look into divisive issues without assuming those holding views other than his/her own is a compromiser in league with Satan.

I’m certainly not holding myself up as the True Heir of Martin Luther, nor, despite my newly recovered respect for him, am I sure I really want to be; I’m fairly confident he wouldn’t spare the rod on a lot of my own views. But I do think that those who won’t be cowed into submitting to the tyranny of the majority and insist upon carefully and humbly cultivating their theology with the best information available, no matter how it horrifies others in their tradition, are following more closely in Luther’s footsteps than those who obdurately defend their inherited interpretation of Scripture against Scripture itself.

Happy Reformation Day!

Related posts:

1. Thinking “Outside the Box” about the Bible
2. Brief question about inerrancy
3. The canon conversation continues

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