From: crf@tomato.princeton.edu (Charles Ferenbaugh)
Newsgroups: soc.religion.christian
Subject: Re: Inerrancy
Date: 16 Aug 92 04:29:06 GMT
Organization: Princeton University

I've been keeping track of the recent exchange of postings on inerrancy,
and I fear RexLex may have left some readers with a mistaken view of
what inerrancy is and what it isn't.  Here follows my attempt to
clear a few things up.

First, even before talking about inerrancy we need to be clear on the
authority of Scripture.  I'll illustrate this distinction using a Beetle
Bailey cartoon from the papers a few years back:

     The lieutenant and the sergeant are reading an order from the general:
     "The general will inspect the men's buns today."  The sergeant looks
     at this order and says, "That can't be right - I'm sure he meant
     to say 'guns.'"  But the lieutenant won't hear of it, and insists
     on obeying the order exactly as written.  So the men turn out for
     inspection, each holding a plate with a bun on it.  Meanwhile on the
     reviewing stand, the general was expecting to see guns, and he wonders,
     "Now what's going on here?"

The military analogy is particularly appropriate here.  In a military
hierarchy, your superior officers have authority over you and you are
not allowed to disobey.  However you _are_ to ask questions when for
some reason you don't understand the orders (provided of course that
you intend to obey them once you do understand them).  Similarly, God
does have authority over us, but that doesn't release us from our obligation
to seek to understand his commands.  And sometimes our search for
understanding will take the form of questioning what we read in the Bible.

Before I leave the cartoon behind, let me use it to illustrate another
point.  The most important thing about God's Word is that it is God's.
So when we're trying to understand it we need to be asking, what
does _God_ mean by such-and-such a passage?  Now oddly enough, this is
something that both conservatives and liberals can forget sometimes.
We've seen enough examples of this on the liberal side:  writing off
the Resurrection as myth, say, or dismissing the outmoded sexual morality.
It's not really fair to God to automatically throw out anything in the
Bible that doesn't square with modern thought.  _But_ neither is it fair
to God to automatically assume that everything is literal and absolute.
The lieutenant's view in the cartoon above illustrates this.  Or for a
real-life example, consider the problems Copernicus had when contending with
the medieval cosmology that was "taught by the Bible."

Our moderator mentioned the "women should keep silence in church" passage
in 1 Cor.  A few years ago I read a study of the relevant passage (among
others) by a conservative, inerrantist scholar, as part of a book on
roles of men and women.  Using a very careful reading of the text, he
established that, _in context_, that particular command was intended by Paul
to address a specific situation, not to be a universal prohibition of
women speaking.  I won't go into details, but I can provide pointers if
anyone is interested in pursuing this further.

In summary:  The Bible is God's Word.  God does not lie.  But we must
seek to understand what God is trying to say through it, realizing that
sometimes our understanding and our assumptions may be faulty and in
need of correction.

By the way, notice that nothing I have said contradicts inerrancy, as
defined by, say, the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy.
(It may contradict what some inerrantists on the street believe, but
that's another matter.)  In fact, I believe these distinctions _must_ be
kept in mind in order for inerrancy to be used properly.

Grace and peace,
Charles Ferenbaugh