Tuesday, August 15, 2006

Where does the Bible claim that it’s inerrant?

The positive argument for biblical inerrany goes like this: since Scripture is inspired by God, then it must be perfect, jot and tittle. This is most commonly based on 2 Tim. 3:16, which says that "All Scripture is God-breathed..." There are other iterations, such as 2 Peter 1:20 "...no prophecy ever came about by the will of man..." And further, if Jesus could make a central point of theology from a verb tense (I AM not I WAS see John 8:56-59), then every aspect, literally every nook and cranny, comma and comment, of Scripture must be perfect.

But where does it say it's innerrant? At the very least, it must be acknowledged that there is a significant interpretive leap from "God-breathed" to innerancy. (And then another leap from innerancy to Old Earth/Left Behind literalism).

One of my clever brothers has asked "but how could God inspire fallacy?"

And I'll leave the commenterati with that.

1 comment:

Ρωμανός ~ Romanós said...

Only the Qur'an is claimed to be perfect in the way that some who espouse inerrancy would have us believe the Bible to be.

It is the hyper-meticulous and defino-maniacal (two new terms which I had to coin for this comment) tendencies in Western rationalism that will not let us simply let the written Word of God be itself to us.

We are not studying the Word or believing its message when we impose speculative strictures on the Holy Scriptures.

Have we forgotten Who the Word of God is in our mad, divisive pursuit of what (we think) it is?