Is Biblical Inerrancy an Essential?

[Daniel Camacho]

My pastor who i deeply love and admire does not hold to inerrancy. I believe Karl Barth and Existentialism have played a huge part in this. When i tell my friends that my pastor does not hold to inerrancy they quickly dismiss him as a heretic. Yet, when they actually come to hear his sermons they are shocked to hear sound exposition. Do you think it is possible that one can deny biblical inerrancy and still remain very Orthodox in his/her beliefs. Is biblical inerrancy essential when someone still believes in the fundamental Christian doctrines and the Gospel?

[Rey Reynoso]

Yes I think its possible since (1) there's shades of what folk believe is inerrant (for example some say: the Bible is inerrant in things theological but prone to error in matters of history) (2) Biblical errancy doesn't deny historicity (Christ died, rose from the grave, etc) (3) even if he holds to the potential of miscommunicated doctrine people aren't all that logically consistant with thinking processes and sometimes can hold two contrary thoughts in happy compartments in the brain that never see the light of each other's hay-day.

[Mike]

This may seem simple, but if just one word of the bible is not true then how can you now with 100% certainty that any of the bible is true?

2 Tim 3:16 (ESV) "All Scripture is breathed out by God and...."

I know this is the most common verse that speaks of this issue, and I don't see how we can believe anything other than the inerrancy of scipture. To me on the most basic level of reasoning and logic, it would make Christianity just like all other religions.

[Rey Reynoso]

Well, let me play the role of lil' Devil.

When you write a letter to someone and mistype something that doesn't make your letter false--its just a typo. There's tons of manuscripts each with their own typos. Now what if I write a letter to someone teaching them a moral lesson and I use the example of toilets in Australia flushing in the opposite direction than toilets in North America. The Coriolis effect illustrates a valuable lesson that yadda yadda yadda.

Now, the reader of the letter knows about The Coriolis effect and says "wait a second: toilets don't do that in Australia. The Coriolis effect doesn't work like that! This letter is a bunch of lies!"

Is the Recipient of the Letter right to throw it away as all lies merely because I used an example of something I didn't fully understand?

[Robert Spruill]

I'm not sure if innerancy is essential for being a Christian. However, I do think it is essential for being an Evangelical (at least in the way which I define the term). Does that make sense? If we do not hold on to innerancy how do we decide what is or is not correct in the biblical text? I think you are on very shaky ground indeed if you adopt this position.

[Mike]

That is why we have different denominations and differences of opinion in theological issues. Prophecy is an excellent example. However, the most fundamental truth of the bible is that it is breathed out by God.
Each writer was human, but was lead by the Holy Spirit.

To say there is error in the Bible is to say that God is not perfect. Does that make sense? I would not dare say that.

Also, who says what is error and what is not? Now you open the whole Bible to be questioned. This is very dangerous ground.

[Paul Ernst]

Hi Daniel,
In my large PCUSA church most of the Pastors are heavely influenced by Barth. I dont think Barth's problem is orthodoxy ( he would affirm the catholic creeds) but epistimology. The pushes transcendence to far and proclaims God unknowable. It's not clear, at least to me and RC Sproul, how he knows what to believe.
Barth believes the Bible is not the word of God but Christ is the Word. He is very Christocentric. The Bible is a human witness to God's revalatory acts in history. Hence bible difficulties and higher criticism are not a problem since the errors are man's not God's. So Barth has a lower view of Scripture than Jesus.

I too can read Barth and say, yes, yes. But at the end he has a philosophical mess. But this is not a problem if you are an existentialist ! Hope that helps.

I think inerrancy is a dangerous word that has to be carefully defined. You leave yoursekf open to gottcha games from bible minalmilists and atheists.

I prefer "The Bible is true in all that it intends to teach" or just God superintended the Scriptures

Paul

[Char]

I was going to say something much like this. I think inerrancy is big and denying it can degrade one's doctrinal standards eventually, but no I don't think it is necessary for salvation.

My father and I fought for years over this issue, and issues of inspiration (how I remember "Paul is just saying he's not quoting Jesus!!" ah the good old days) but in the end God was pleased to speak to him by the word that he saw as flawed of the Word made flesh whom he knew was not.

[James Wright]

Well, CS Lewis didn't hold to "inerrancy" either in the form that most of us think. Nor do I really - mainly meaning that the letters and words do not mean more than the WORD itself.

Inerrancy of the Bible would mean that even copying it word for word would somehow have mystical spell of not copying a letter wrong. That is silliness. Jehovah's Witnesses can prove that wrong immediately by having a faulty translation. Satan does it most of all when he "quotes" scripture to us.
We are getting into something like the Islamic idea of the Koran if we do that. That is one reason I think God speaks in parables and poetry so often - so that you don't miss the point of the story even if you get a word wrong. There are two versions of the Beginning that are just different enough to tell me that it is true; ie. there was Adam and there were 7 days, but that I shouldn't necessarily go about talking of the fruit as an apple, quince or melon.
There are differing qualities to the gospels that say to me they are more true than any other book. We make a horrid mistake to think that the pages are more important than what comes through them. They are ink and pulp. God's Word is more than "words" can ever tell. That is why He had to come in the Flesh. In a much higher sense than literary inerrancy, we mean to say, Divine inerrancy. God cannot make a mistake.
Besides, He tends to use us fallen people well enough - and we are made in His image and His Spirit lives within us as well as the Bible is His Holy Word. David and Moses were both murderers. The Body of Christ is perfect and holy before God, yet we each are members of it, broken.
Some one said something about denominations. I think one of the reasons we have so many is that people put more import on the "type" than the "Word."

On a second note, even if, say, Job or the Flood is not "true" in that he was a walking talking man (which I think he was) or an actual event (which I think it was) it would not make the story any less true, or make God a liar any more than it made Jesus a liar to tell the story of the prodigal son. In it being a living literary piece, there is more freedom of truth than that of a solid object - how could that contain God? The book is more than its binding.

[Nick Alander]

I'm going to have to agree with Mike. If you don't believe that the whole Bible is 100% true fact (yes, this is purposely redundant), then how can you believe any of it? It is the age that we are in that says that God deals in gray areas; this would be where the doubt of inerrancy comes into play. But God only deals only in absolutes: there is a heaven and a hell, no in-between; there are the saved and the unsaved, not a 'kind of saved'; we are saved by faith not works. These are clearly black and white issues, not the common gray area issues that people make them into. Joseph Smith Jr didn't believe in inerrancy either, so he rewrote some of the Bible in the JSKJV (aka the Mormon bible).

If you don't hold to inerrancy, then how can you hold to anything in the Bible and call it truth? Who's truth? If we want to split hairs and make the Bible - the God breathed Word - a book of errors, then it all becomes relative (a post-modern thought). Then it is up to the reader to determine if that works for them? And if it doesn't work for their sinful (yes, all are sinful - Romans 3:23) lifestyle, it must be an error, right? The Bible works for everyone. God used human penmen to write His Word, His message to us. Who are we to think we know better than God as to what God was saying?

I would seriously question any Pastor who does not hold to inerrancy.

[Stephen Douglas]

If you don't hold to inerrancy, then how can you hold to anything in the Bible and call it truth? Who's truth? If we want to split hairs and make the Bible - the God breathed Word - a book of errors, then it all becomes relative (a post-modern thought). Then it is up to the reader to determine if that works for them?

It's a severe mischaracterization (of my position at least) to say that the Bible is a "book of errors". It's no more a book of errors than Gibbon's The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Could Gibbon have gotten a fact or two wrong? If so, does that make his book a book of errors and useless for us to study if we want to know anything about that era of Roman history? I've heard Michael Patton say something to the effect that even if the Bible is only as accurate as Josephus, we still have a book the world cannot ignore: we still have a man walking around performing miracles, dying, and rising from the dead. Christians even in the first century placed a high value on truth, given that they followed a guy Who called Himself the Truth, so we can't realistically expect the Bible to be riddled with lies - only eyewitness testimony of honest men who remained men. No one listens to the testimony of honest eyewitnesses and says, "But they're men, so what they're saying is a testimony of errors." It is only reasonable to assume that Scripture is even more accurate than Caesar's Gallic Wars, for instance, because he isn't known as a paragon of honesty and objectivity.

To say that God didn't concern Himself over errors in peripheral matters does not call into question His providential hand in making it "useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the man of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work." To admit verifiable errors in, for example, the authors' cosmological conceptions that bled through the pages is not to say that God could not use those people, any more than God is required to make us sin-free, omniscient, and failure-proof before He asks us to do His work.

The all-or-none approach actually undermines the Bible's value: as James alluded to above, what good is claiming that God had to give us a document whose every word perfectly and completely matched reality when He obviously didn't find it necessary to preserve that pristine quality? By the time the next book was written, there was a good chance that there were already transmission errors. That inconsistency in the all-or-nothing view of Scriptural inerrancy is what caused Bart Ehrman's fall from the faith: if God was by nature required (as most inerrantists imply) to give us a perfect piece of incorruptible divine truth, free from error or obfuscation, He would by logical necessity also be required to keep it uncorrupted as long as He intended its use. Errors in transmission undermine the philosophical basis for the necessity of the Bible to be completely free of error.

[Char]

It is false to say God was forced to give us inerrancy, however it is true that the nature of the revelation and of God himself says this would be so. I reject the premise that he must preserve the transmission of the scriptures to a letter. There is no such requirement upon him and I do not see how it follows. A position of inerrancy does not insist this and there is no reason why it should.

[Barrett Young]

Correct. There is a difference between a doctrine of inerrancy and a doctrine of the preservation of the text. I hold to a doctrine of inerrancy, because since the original autographs were God inspired, they contain no errors in all they touch regarding faith and practice. But I do not hold that we possess still today 100% of the original wording...