Categories
rey's a point scripture

Why I Don’t Have To Hold To Inerrancy

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.

Categories
quotables quotes rey's a point

Quotables: What Christ’s Incarnation Teaches About Inerrancy

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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?

Categories
quotables quotes rey's a point

Quotables: The Significance of His Teaching

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It thus appears that Christ’s answer to the problem of authority can be summed up as follows:

  1. The Old Testament is to be received on His authority (over and above its own witness to itself) as the authoritative written utterance of God, abidingly true and trustworthy. Its divine authority and His confirm each other, so that not to accept both would be to accept neither.
  2. To learn what they must believe and do, His disciples are not to regard His words alone, but to take His teaching and the Old Testament together, reading the old revelation as the presupposition of the new and the new as both expounding and augmenting the old. In conjunction with Christ’s teaching, the written word of the Old Testament retains its full, divine authority.
Categories
apologetics hermeneutics

Slavery and Inerrancy

In a recent discussion regarding the evangelical doctrine of the inerrancy of Scripture, an argument was raised which was supposed to be a slam dunk case against the doctrine. The doctrine basically states that the Biblical text is free from error. Some inerrantists have argued that this position is true of the original documents (which we don’t have) and others have stated that the inerrancy is in regards to every thing the Bible purports to speak on—be it science, history, geography; whatever. Now barring all the possible charges that might come up (the discussion can be found here and ranges some five hundred responses) I just wanted to deal with this one bit that came up.