How do you figure? The Bible might be objective Truth in some abstract theoretical sense, but the process of getting meaning/truth out of Scripture is far from “objective.” It is riddled with just as many susceptibilities to the weaknesses of faulty human reasoning and presuppositions as science is. That is the problem. People confuse their subjective interpretations with some abstract concept of the infallible inerrant word of God.
How is “without sin” conflated with “without error”? Kenton Sparks in Sacred Word Broken Word asked the question, did Jesus ever, when he was learning the carpenter trade, measure wrong and have to throw out the board? Did he ever look across the way in bright sunlight and say, “Hey, James!” when it was really John? Those are errors. They are manifestations of human limitations. Humans don’t get everything perfect because their memories, senses, and learning are limited and finite and imperfect. If we can even imagine that Jesus, God incarnate, got some stuff wrong on occasion, why is it hard to imagine that biblical authors got some things wrong on occasion, even though they were inspired, and even though their words are God’s word “inscripturate”?
That would be a terrible idea. Inerrancy gives people hives. For all different reasons. I’m sure BioLogos gives some people hives already, but we don’t want that to become the trademark.
I think it is an accommodation, but I think the biblical authors were also wrong about some stuff, and it affects how they wrote Scripture. This to me is a bigger, more concerning and pressing issue for the inerrancy camp than “fixing” references to a solid firmament or the Hebrew’s travelling water rock. The slavery passages, the use and abuse of concubines, the genocide passages, the passage where a man offers his daughter as a human sacrifice to fulfill a vow to God and there is no indication that it was bad, the women as chattel passages, definitely seem to affirm things that make me more than uncomfortable, things I would say are wrong. Again Kenton Sparks made me think hard when he pointed out that the reason we are so uncomfortable with them and they strike us as so wrong is that we have a moral sensitivity shaped by the New Testament ethic. How can the Bible make us uncomfortable with the Bible unless there is some sort of redemptive trajectory going on and even parts of Scripture “stand in need of redemption”?
It was Jesus and the apostles who taught and modeled the very things that have shaped our moral consciousness to the point where we reject slavery, genocide, human sacrifice, and the subjugation and sexual exploitation of women. William Webb has written extensively on the redemptive-movement hermeneutic, and others have taken the narrative theology approach, and I think they are often much more useful (and less disturbing) than the concept of inerrancy when we are trying to figure out what God is saying through the Bible in history.
God did not stop communicating with us when the last letter was written. He is and has been working in history. He indwells believers. The Church is Christ’s body and has the mind of Christ. The Bible is not the only voice that has been delegated God’s authority on earth. If we had a better, fuller, perhaps more Trinitarian model of how God works and speaks authoritatively through his chosen voices, maybe we wouldn’t feel such a need for the crutch inerrancy provides. I don’t really understand what it is for, other than to prop up the Bible’s authority.
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