Faithful readers of this blog will know that I occasionally post articles about why you can believe and rely on the Bible, as well as criticize people like Bart Ehrman for making really stupid arguments to the contrary. That being said, I also believe that there are serious issues with those who claim that the Bible is inerrant, or “without error in any way.”
Believers in inerrancy, I think, find themselves putting more faith in inerrancy than they do in the Gospel; however, the 1st Century Christians didn’t, for the most part, even have the Bible. Yet, it is clear from Paul’s epistles that they had “the Word of God.” I suspect that the real issue underlying inerrancy is that these Christians have become trapped in modernistic thinking, where propositions must meet certain criteria in order to be “true.” In this way, it seems that those requiring that the Bible be inerrant actually suffer from a lack of faith – one of the unfortunate consequences of modernism – rather than having a greater faith, as they would have us believe.
Yesterday Stephen at Undeception posted The Bible and the need for proof, makes some good points about why we don’t need to believe in “inerrancy” in order to believe the Gospel. He asks at the conclusion, “why is it logically necessary, rather than merely preferable for one reason or another, that the Bible be entirely true through and through?”
My question, just because I’m curious, is “What do you believe about the Bible, and why?”