I grew up in a Pentecostal fundagelical church where we prided ourselves on taking Scripture seriously. That meant, among other things, a commitment to literal interpretation. From a literal six days of creation to a literal thousand year millennium, we took Scripture in what we believed to be the natural sense. And that meant reading it, ahem, like a newspaper.
Literal interpretation aside, if there was one doctrine that demonstrated our commitment to Scripture, it was biblical inerrancy. We thought of the Bible as a repository of propositions describing God and our relationship with him. And inerrancy promised that every one of those propositions was a fact. Since we imagined doctrine to consist of simple deduction from the Bible, inerrancy thereby provided confidence in the facts of Christian doctrine from creation to new creation.
Our bold and clear doctrine of inerrancy contrasted with the weak and woolly liberal descriptions of biblical authority. More than once I heard my fellow fundagelical Christians joke that trying to get a liberal clear on the inspiration and authority of the Bible was about as easy as nailing Jell-O to a wall.
That’s the way I used to see things. However, today I view matters very differently. Indeed, it now seems to me that if any view of Scripture is liable to the charge of Jell-O nailed to the wall, it is—ironically enough—that of inerrancy itself. Indeed, once we… [Read more…] about Inerrancy: Still Hazy After All These Years
