From: mangoe@cs.umd.edu (Charley Wingate)
Newsgroups: soc.religion.christian
Subject: Re: Inerrancy & Inspiration
Date: 17 Aug 92 07:03:50 GMT

My complaints against inerrancy are several.

First, it seems to me to be inconsistent with its premises.  A god who can
transmit a text inerrantly through fallible humans can just as well transmit
the saving Word through an imperfect text.  Even the teaching itself of
inerrancy must pass through the same channels.

Second, plenary inspiration produces an inerrant text which we do not, in
fact, have.  This is adequately attested to by the variant texts which we do
have, and more profoundly, by the condition of the hebrew text.  If the word
of the LORD is to be written down inerrantly, it is singularly useless as
such unless it is also transmitted inerrantly, which it is not.  Theorizing
about translation is not helpful in this regard, or else, to the
fundamentalist, the NRSV would rank higher than the NIV.

Third, it is not necessary to a conservative position.  By and large,
conservative anglicans do not accept the strongest forms of inerrancy; the
BCP says only that "We call [the scriptures] the Word of God because God
inspired their human authors and because God still speaks to us through the
Bible."  The writers of the Baltimore Declaration are armed to take on
Bishop Spong without resort to inerrancy of the kind being discussed here;
this does not mean that they (or I for that matter) think that that there
are errors in the divine word, but rather that its truth is of a more
profound nature than mere literal inerrancy.

I will rise to the challenge of the three questions by taking a more subtle
approach.  I do not believe that the Word of God is so easily corruptible;
yet the word that we have is manifestly "damaged".  But the Spirit and the
Word are more powerful than this; the variants are found, yet the Word
lives.  Our eternal salvation is not merely in the syllables of scripture,
but in the whole sentences of our life in the church, in faith, and in the
Spirit.

Inerrancy, in my opinion, arises out of insecurity and a failure to consider
the full import of "The wind blows where it pleases."  God is hardly
constrained to reveal himself in a manner congenial to the minds of men, as
scripture testifies abundantly.  Faith is not the result of things certainly
revealed; as scripture testifies, it is "the evidence of things unseen."

The implicit attack upon the Apocrypha is a case in point of the
inconsistency in appeals to inerrancy.  Gaussen's comment on Maccabees is,
of course, in contradiction to a millenium of the catholic tradition; and if
it were possible that the church could "render divine" a human work for
three quarters of christian history, then what error is not possible?
Indeed, Gaussen's implicit assertion concerning the Roman church's role in
this is entirely inaccurate, for (first of all) not only Rome, but also
Constantinople and even Canterbury have always recognized the power of these
books, and (second) the authority of these books was not concluded by any of
these, but they received it of their Jewish predecessors.  The rejection of
the apocrypha is an act of the reformation, and if they may be rejected,
what else may not be?

Inerrancy, as a doctrine, has slid, in the hands of protestants, from being
a defense of the text to being a defense of other doctrines, most of which
have little real connection to inerrancy per se.  If so eminently Roman
Catholic a saint as Thomas Aquinas can embrace it, it should therefore be
clear that it is not exclusively the province of protestant fundamentalism.
-- 
C. Wingate        + "The peace of God, it is no peace,
                  +    but strife closed in the sod.
mangoe@cs.umd.edu +  Yet, brothers, pray for but one thing:
tove!mangoe       +    the marv'lous peace of God."