{"id":26063,"date":"2014-09-06T10:10:56","date_gmt":"2014-09-06T14:10:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/exploringourmatrix\/?p=26063"},"modified":"2014-09-06T10:10:56","modified_gmt":"2014-09-06T14:10:56","slug":"inerrancys-broken-promise","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/religionprof\/2014\/09\/inerrancys-broken-promise.html","title":{"rendered":"Inerrancy’s Broken Promise"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

Fred Clark has\u00a0a great post on Biblical inerrancy<\/a>, and the fact that it cannot deliver what its proponents claim that it can. He writes:<\/p>\n

It doesn\u2019t work. That\u2019s the fatal flaw of biblical inerrancy \u2014 it just plain doesn\u2019t work.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t just mean that it\u2019s a poor hermeneutic that encourages self-deception and projection and semi-conscious eisegesis, although that\u2019s all true too.<\/p>\n

What I mean is that the main attraction of biblical inerrancy \u2014 the first and last reason people are drawn to it \u2014 is that it promises them something it does not and cannot deliver\u2026<\/p>\n

I get the attraction there, and why the idea is appealing. Who wouldn\u2019t want such a thing \u2014 an accessible arbiter, always at hand, to definitively settle every dispute? We Protestants don\u2019t have a pope to play that role, so why not enthrone the Bible as our infallible \u201csupreme and final authority?\u201d<\/p>\n

The problem, again, is that this doesn\u2019t work. We can\u2019t instantly resolve our disagreements by turning to the Bible when those disagreements are about what the Bible means.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s why the Bible can never be, and never has been, a self-evident \u201csupreme and final authority.\u201d It cannot magically sweep away the \u201cepistemological crisis\u201d of being human because it\u2019s a bunch of us humans who are trying to read the thing.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And the ending of the post is pure gold, too:<\/p>\n

This same pattern is repeated wherever any group of \u201cinerrantists\u201d gets together and claims that their inerrant, infallible Bible will be their supreme and final authority. It doesn\u2019t work. The arbiter fails to arbitrate and the definitive authority fails to settle all their questions.<\/p>\n

So they\u00a0add<\/em>\u00a0to it. They write up a \u201cstatement of faith\u201d and require it to be endorsed as a kind of loyalty oath. That statement attempts to clarify what they agree to agree the Bible means, and what they agree to agreethey<\/em>\u00a0mean by what the Bible means.<\/p>\n

And then, after that \u201cstatement of faith\u201d swells to several thousand words \u2014 revised, amended and expanded in a race against ever-arising new ambiguities \u2014 they\u2019ll realize that doesn\u2019t work either, and they\u2019ll supplement that supplemental document with additional abstracts of principles and manifestos and declarations.<\/p>\n

This extracanonical canon of biblical inerrantists now rivals the original biblical canon in size, density, and \u2014 despite their best efforts \u2014 ambiguity. And every page of it is proof \u2014 definitive, final, supreme \u2014 that the epistemological certainty promised by inerrancy is a lie.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Click through<\/a> to read the whole thing.<\/p>\n

\"The<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Fred Clark has\u00a0a great post on Biblical inerrancy, and the fact that it cannot deliver what its proponents claim that it can. He writes: It doesn\u2019t work. That\u2019s the fatal flaw of biblical inerrancy \u2014 it just plain doesn\u2019t work. I don\u2019t just mean that it\u2019s a poor hermeneutic that encourages self-deception and projection and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":136,"featured_media":26066,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,136,139,43],"tags":[461,1140,1148,3592,5154],"class_list":["post-26063","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-bible","category-evangelicals","category-fundamentalism-religion","category-inerrancy","tag-al-mohler","tag-bible","tag-biblical","tag-fred-clark","tag-inerrancy"],"yoast_head":"\nInerrancy's Broken Promise<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Fred Clark has\u00a0a great post on Biblical inerrancy, and the fact that it cannot deliver what its proponents claim that it can. 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