Re: [asa] Question on inerrancy

It strikes me that much of what is said about biblical inerrancy is of a piece with the hankering for a golden age that I spoke of in another thread. People insist that God had to inspire a book that meets their standard of perfection, just as they think that God had to create a world that measures up to their ideas of what a good world would be. Both are attempts to fit God into our boxes and both have been forced step by step to retreat from originally robust versions of those claims. The golden age for many Christians is reduced to Adam & Eve's few hours of moral perfection one afternoon, & claims that used to be made for the absolute truthfulness of scripture, its grammatical perfection, divine preservation of the original texts &c have now been whittled down either to the inerrancy of autographs we don't have &/or to ingenious harmonizations, concordist schemes, implausible chains of events, special pleadings &c.

Most seriously though, the insistence on biblical inerrancy on all matters, including astronomy, geography, history &c, even more than belief in a golden age, pays no attention to the character of the God revealed in Jesus Christ, a God who is willing to limit himself to the human condition in order to accomplish his purposes.

As to the standard proof texts -

II Tim.3:16 The argument that inspiration implies inerrancy is simply a restatement of the unjustified assumption that God had to give us an inerrant book. It ignores the possibility that the activity of the Holy Spirit in inspiring the biblical writers had some of the kenotic character of the Incarnation - a possibility that anyone who takes belief in the Trinity seriously should consider.

Titus 1:2 The statement that God never lies does not mean that the Bible can contain no error. A lie is intended to deceive, and the Spirit's accomodation to the level of natural knowledge of the biblical writers was not intended to deceive us. If I knowingly oversimplify an explanation of some phenomenon to my 3 year old grandson so that he can understand what I'm talking about, I'm not lying to him.

Shalom
George
http://web.raex.com/~gmurphy/

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Received on Sat May 10 13:41:27 2008