Category Archives: Inerrancy of Bible

Inerrancy – a taxonomy

Walking With Giants Posted on by

In Christian Theology (3rd ed. Baker Academic, 2013), Millard J. Erickson (2013) outlines a number of approaches to biblical inerrancy.

I summarise:

1. Absolute inerrancy.  The Bible is completely true in all of its utterances, whether historical, scientific or theological.

2. Full inerrancy.  The Bible is completely true.  However, scientific and historical data are conveyed phenomenally, as they appear to the human eye.  They include approximations, couched in popular, rather than scientific language.

3. Limited inerrancy regards the Bible unfailingly true in its teaching on all matters that pertain to salvation and the spiritual life. …

Lk 19:12-26 and ‘editorial fatigue’

Walking With Giants Posted on by

In Jesus, Contradicted, Michael Licona discusses the issue of ‘editorial fatigue’ as a way of explaining some of the differences between the Gospels.

He quotes Mark Goodacre:

When one writer is copying the work of another, changes are sometimes made at the beginning of an account that are not sustained throughout. The writer lapses into docile reproduction of the source. Like continuity errors in film and television, editorial fatigue results in unconscious mistakes, small errors of detail that naturally arise in the course of constructing a narrative.

…

Inerrancy – a mainly American problem?

Walking With Giants Posted on by

Michael Bird, while not disavowing biblical inerrancy, is concerned with how that doctrine has functioned, especially in North America.

‘American evangelicals demand a rigid precision for inerrancy not shared by the global church, they position inerrancy rather than christology as the chief marker of orthodoxy, and they police inerrancy in their networks with a Taliban-esque ferocity.’

Moreover, suggests Bird, when they seek to defend inerrancy what they often end up doing is defending the inerrancy of their own interpretation of Scripture and the hegemony of their own evangelical tribe.…

John Calvin on errors in Scripture

Walking With Giants Posted on by

I appreciate the work that Wyatt Houtz has done in demonstrating John Calvin’s approach to various apparent discrepancies in the Bible.

Here’s briefest of summaries.  In most cases, I have elaborated in my Bible Commentary on the various passages.

Gen 1:14:16 – Calvin knows that the Moon is not larger than Saturn, and that the Moon is a dark opaque body and not a luminary.  Calvin concludes that the author of Genesis is justified in using unscientific language, in order for God’s revelation to be understood by ordinary people.…

Inerrancy: the key theological challenge of our day?

Walking With Giants Posted on by

John Warwick Montgomery begins his article on ‘Inspiration and Inerrancy: a New Departure’ (Bulletin of the Evangelical Theological Society, Vol 8, No 2, Spring, 1965) by referring to James Orr’s The Progress of Dogma (4th edition, 1901).

Orr’s contention was that in each epoch of the Christian church has been characterised by focus on one particular doctrine that has proved crucial both for that day and subsequently.

‘In the Patristic era, the issue was the relation of the persons of the Godhead, and particularly the Christological problem of Jesus’ character; the Ecumenical Creeds represent the success of Orthodox, Trinitarian theology over against numerous christological heresies, any one of which could have permanently destroyed the Christian faith.

…

‘Fundamentalism’ revisited (again)

Walking With Giants Posted on by

Some years ago, I wrote:

‘It occurs to me that theological liberalism reached the height of its influence in the period leading up to 1977.  In fact, Alister McGrath makes a comment to this effect in his biography of J.I. Packer, To Know and Serve God, p212.  In that year two books were published by SCM Press which seemed finally to demonstrate that liberalism was, in the end, an impoverished, negative, destructive influence that was incapable of serving the purpose of Christ in this or any other generation. 

…

Mark 6:45 – ‘To Bethsaida’

Walking With Giants Posted on by

Mark 6:45f ‘Immediately Jesus made his disciples get into the boat and go on ahead to the other side, to Bethsaida, while he dispersed the crowd. After saying good-bye to them, he went to the mountain to pray.’

Lk 9:10 appears to place the miracle at or near Bethsaida.  Matthew, whose account many judge to be based on that of Mark, omits the references to Bethsaida.  Was he, perhaps, correcting what he saw to be a minor problem in Mark’s account?  …

Matthew 8:5/Luke 7:3 – Who asked Jesus to help?

Walking With Giants Posted on by

Matthew (Mt 8:5-12) and Luke (Lk 7:1-10) both have an account of a Roman centurion whose servant Jesus healed.

Matthew 8:5 When he entered Capernaum, a centurion came to him asking for help.

Luke 7:3 ‘When the centurion heard about Jesus, he sent some Jewish elders to him, asking him to come and heal his slave.’

So, did the centurion personally ask Jesus for help, or did he send others to do this on his behalf?…

Jesus: a ‘new and improved’ Moses?

Walking With Giants Posted on by

Should we regard the Old Testament and the New Testament as continuous, or discontinuous, with one another?  The standard evangelical approach is to regard the relationship between the two as that between bud and flower, source and stream, promise and fulfilment.

But many are troubled by the moral teaching and actions recorded in the Old Testament, and ask how this can be reconciled with the teaching and actions of Jesus.

Taking the difficult matter of the destruction of the Canaanites as his starting point, Peter Enns looks at Matthew’s Gospel, asking, ‘What would Jesus do?’…

“Aha” moments that challenged beliefs about the Bible

Walking With Giants Posted on by

In 2014, Old Testament scholar Peter Enns began a series of posts in which he invited biblical scholars to share key moments when their inherited conservative view of the Bible was challenged, and subsequently modified.

Here’s the (very) distilled essence of each entry in the series:-

  1. Peter Enns – realised that Paul accepted, apparently without demur, the extra-biblical legend about a ‘moveable rock’ (1 Corinthians 10:4).
  2. John Byron – found that Jesus (or Mark) was mistaken about what 1 Samuel 21:1-9 says about David and his men eating the consecrated bread from the tabernacle.
…