Pages

Tuesday, October 19, 2010

Errancy

Trevin Wax over at his blog got me thinking again about inerrancy.  I don't try to be enigmatic, but the only reason I believe inerrancy is correct is because I think it's true!  However (to loosely paraphrase Socrates) unexamined thoughts aren't worth holding dearly to.  So let me lay out my thinking for critique.

Non-negotiable presuppositions (we can negotiate them in another post!)
1. God exists and communicates
2. God is one of the dual authors of the Bible
3. God doesn't make mistakes

Which means the question of inerrancy/errancy is really about does (or to what extent) God allow errors in Scripture?

If God allows human error in the Bible, then we have 3 options:
  1. God allows only small and easily recognizable errors
  2. God also allows some really large clangers but they're still recognizable
  3. God allows all sorts of errors some of which we haven't even discovered yet
for one of the following reasons:
  1. God wants to show the fallenness of the Bible's human authors
  2. For reasons that are entirely his own 
  3. For a mixed bag of reasons not limited to: evealing human sinfulness, encouraging scholarship, as a way of commenting on complexity in the world, or some as yet unrevealed purpose
Any line of argument would need to account for the idea that Scripture is to be trusted, (inerrancy moves the fallible human thing to interpretation) and some sort of explanation of how we spot an error.