What’s the big deal about biblical inerrancy?
Posted in Theology on Oct 18th, 2008
For a lot of Christians, biblical inerrancy (the view that the Bible, as God’s word, is infallible and so free from error) is a big deal. There seems to be this idea that in order to be a proper Christian, one who is passionately committed to following God, you have to believe that he inspired the Bible in such a way as to protect its authors from error.
This idea has become important enough to Christianity that some people now reject Christianity on the ground that the Bible contains errors. I think that this is a mistake. I don’t think that biblical inerrancy is central to Christianity, and I don’t think that biblical errancy (the view that the Bible does contain errors) is a good reason to reject Christianity.
The argument seems to be that once you admit that the Bible is wrong about one thing, you can’t trust it on anything else. Either the Bible is God’s perfect and infallible word, or we might as well bin it.
However, we learn from books that are fallible all the time. Every text book that you used at school was written by a fallible human being, but you used and trusted it. If we only trusted infallible sources of information, then we wouldn’t believe a thing.
Pretty much everyone has used and trusted a phone book at some point. I’ve got bad news for you: phone books contain errors. I know this because I once looked up the number for a local Catholic church, The Church of the Sacred Heart, and it was listed as The Church of the Scared Heart. I still use and trust the phone book. Even having read this, so will you.
When we’re ready to believe other books that are fallible, why do we insist on holding the Bible to a different standard? Why the false dichotomy: infallible or useless?
What matters is not whether a source of information is infallible but whether it is reliable. By all means, let’s discuss alleged contradictions and mistakes in the biblical record, but we mustn’t think that a single biblical error would spell the end for Christianity. The focus should be on biblical reliability, not on biblical inerrancy.