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Dr. Briggs is more blunt and more explicit in his description of the changes which he thinks have been wrought. “I will tell you what criticism has destroyed,” he says in an article published a couple of years ago.” It has destroyed many false theories about the Bible; it has destroyed the doctrine of verbal inspiration; it has destroyed the theory of inerrancy; it has destroyed the false doctrine that makes the inspiration depend upon its attachment to a holy man.”
I’ve been arguing online with folk who don’t hold to inerrancy on, what I think, is faulty grounds.
For example, some folk deny inerrancy because the “distinctly evangelical doctrine causes too many problems.” Okay, but how is that a reason to chuck a doctrine? Then there’s another common (silly) argument that “holding to inerrancy is a distinctly docetic view of Scripture that gets rid of the messiness of human frailty” or, in other words, since humans make mistakes we should expect Scripture to make mistakes. I’ve off-handedly argued that error isn’t necessarily human and that humans actually do speak inerrantly all the time. If it’s possible once, its surely possible twice—and so on.
In all my discussions, I might have given off the impression that the doctrine of inerrancy is central to Christianity—lose inerrancy and lose Christianity. Surely I’ve left people in an epistemological quagmire to force them to think, but surely I don’t want to give the impression that they’ve lost their Christianity.
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The logic of some still insists that anything involving humanity has to allow for the possibility of sin. So, they say, as long as the Bible is both a divine and a human book the possibility and actuality of errors exist.
Let us examine that premise. Is it always inevitable that sin is involved where humanity is?
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It thus appears that Christ’s answer to the problem of authority can be summed up as follows:
s I said, I’m dealing with teaching that was done during this past summer and how I reformulated it, re-stated it, re-taught it, or just rectified it. This comes from the VBS we had this summer, made available from Answers in Genesis.
The Teaching and Its Problem:
Lesson 3 in the book was Eternal Life and the Intelligence of Early Man with an emphasis on man being an intelligent thinking being, which God loved, instead of a mere animal. The key verse here was Gen 6:23 and the lesson was supposed to draw from Genesis 3. But the focus, once again, was on the apologetic response to the professed belief that early man was an animal whose brain evolved.
I thought that detracted from the main chapter and verse for the lesson. So I reformulated it to focus more on what Humans do to the Image of God and what that says about God.