Michael Bird on Five Views on Biblical Inerrancy

Michael F. Bird, Lecturer in theology at Ridley Melbourne College of Mission and Ministry, and co-author of Five Views on Biblical Inerrancy, discusses the difference between the North American and international views on this hot-button topic.

[preteristlab-endtimes]

Claiming 'inerrancy' seems to be a back-door way of claiming authority, or at least sidestepping the conventional norms of reason. I came across this quote by Bishop Hoadly that neatly expresses the idea. "Whoever hath an absolute authority to interpret any written or spoken laws, it is he who is truly the Law-giver to all intents and purposes, and not the person who first wrote or spoke them."
Benjamin Hoadly 1676-1761.

[thebiblestudyhelper]

If inarrancy is a reality, it can't possibly mean "the absence of textual error ".

[jimfoard]

In 2 Kings 13:1 in the 23rd year of Joash's reign over Judah, Jehoahaz begins his reign over Israel for 17 years. 17 + 23 is 40; but in 2 Kings 13:9-10 Jehoahaz dies and his son reigns over Israel in the 37th year of Joash''s reign, which is only 14 years, not 17. Explain.

[skrich]

We have a fully orbed and robust statement, The Chicago Statement.

[andrisstanga]

What does the bible say about itself? Let's start with the problem of the terminology you are using. Only twice in scripture does it speak of 'the word of God, ' and both times this is nothing at all about a book. Instead it is about a person. The way this terminology is commonly used in evangelicalism equates a book with a person. That's pretty insulting to the person! But the fact this person is a person of the Holy Trinity calls us to consider whether this terminology is actually blasphemy, almost saying that the Holy Trinity of the Evangelicals is Father, Bible, and Holy Spirit - with the Son at a lower status than the Trinity so that the heretical "Father turns away from the Son" idea can be propagated about the Crucifixion. But we have ONE God and not three - therefore the Father was with and in the Son on the Cross and could not turn away (in fact, Jesus was pointing us to Psalm 22 where it specifically states the Father did not turn away).
There's so much that stems from this terminology - the biggest problem being that it tends towards thinking of the bible as a unitary whole. This is even a denial of the name:bible - which comes from both the Greek and Latin words for library. It is a collection of written works and not only one work, and written over a period of at least 1000 years, during which even among the Jews the perception and understanding of who God is and what He is like changed a lot. It is not God that changed, but the people and their understanding. Yet we have books from both early understanding and later - and not surprisingly they seem to portray different gods. To try to brush this all under the table with the 'inerrancy' statement is simply dishonesty, bringing rightful scorn against the teachings of the evangelical defenders of such atrocities as the Chicago Statement of 1978.

[moeshaarmstead]

I don’t care who you are stop taken money out my account so I reported you for fraud

[ricklannoye]

THE BIBLE IS BEST DESCRIBED AS A 10, 000 PIECE JIGSAW PUZZLE...THAT IS MISSING ABOUT HALF THE PIECES!

If only we had one book that had descended to earth, directly from God, in words we all understood, and it contained only what God wanted for all of us, at all times and in every circumstance! There are more than a few religious leaders, preachers and teachers who try to make it seem like there is such a singular book they call THE BIBLE.
Trouble is--no such book exists!
What is so often called "THE Bible, " is actually a very broad array of many different collections of books, in many different languages, not always containing the same books, which are not translated from the original copies of any of them, because every single one of the original "autographs" have been lost, and all we have are copies...of copies of copies of copies...and even those differ one from the other!
OK, so let's say we can at least agree that the original writings were, every one "inerrant." Apparently not!
At the International Council on Biblical Inerrancy, that was held in Chicago in October 1978, a very conservative group, came out with a statement declaring what "inerrancy" of the bible meant, and all they did was re-define the meaning of the word "inerrancy" to exclude the 1000s of discrepancies between all the copies of copies of copies of texts that had been discovered up to that time, and they refused to recognize the results of the discipline of Contextual Criticism, the way all legit scholars of antiquity determine what parts of any copy of ancient documents is most likely in accord with the originals and which are not!
OK, so let's just say we could agree on what scholars tell us which texts most likely represent the original writings of the bible books...then you have to ask, "Which books?"
Today's Protestant Bible, for example, has 27 New Testament books, but before 1807, it had only 26, before the American Bible Society surreptitiously removed the Introduction page to the apocryphal books, like Revelation, which was often added to their printed editions!
OK, so let's say we agree on what Protestants thought of as "The" Bible books before the 19th Century. Then how to know which parts of the that Bible represent God speaking to us today, and which parts not? Jesus, himself, said the Law of Moses was given for the hardness of men's hearts, a stop gap measure, not the full and final version of what God really wanted to tell us!
OK, so let's say, for Christians, what really matters is what Jesus said, and everything else, such as the Old Testament and the later Epistles, must be interpreted through the prism of what Jesus taught and not the other way around.
Well, maybe we're now getting to the heart of the matter...as long as we understand Jesus often spoke in parables, and more than a few times, employed the use of hyperbole, and probably because his real views, had he expressed them openly and unreservedly from the get go of his public ministry, he would have been killed right away, and we would never have even heard of him...so he also spoke as if he agreed with what the Pharisees taught, only to put a little twist on them, as his way of conveying his real positions but only to those "who had ears to hear."
Is, then, "inerrancy" the word to describe the process of peeling back all the many layers of trying to get at what Jesus of Nazareth was really driving at and what was, centuries after their deaths, attributed to Moses, the Jewish prophets and writers of the New Testament?
Well, how about another term that much better fits what we have to work with--a 10, 000 piece jigsaw puzzle!
Depending on what's included (just the Greek and Hebrew or the Latin and other language versions), there are somewhere between 6, 000 and 20, 000 texts of the Bible, none of them the originals, but copies of copies of copies.
So, more than a few people are content to claim one version of this puzzle, pieced together by representatives of one particular religious sect that began when a murderous king wanted to get rid of his Catholic wife that could not bear him a male heir, the King James Bible, is somehow miraculously equal to the original autographs, and every part of it (well, as cherry picked and then proclaimed from pulpits) represents what God says to everyone today.
However, if we apply honest scholarship to weed out all the fake pieces someone cut out and added to the box (using Textual Criticism), and do our best not to cram pieces together with others where they, in context, do not really fit (using Contextual Criticism), even though what remains represents only about half of what was in the original box, a pretty good picture emerges...that is, if one is willing to accept that picture for what it is, regardless of how well it compares to or contrasts with the image created by Churchianity!