{"id":47018,"date":"2018-06-01T05:44:49","date_gmt":"2018-06-01T09:44:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/religionprof\/?p=47018"},"modified":"2018-05-29T22:06:15","modified_gmt":"2018-05-30T02:06:15","slug":"inerrancy-conversation-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/religionprof\/2018\/06\/inerrancy-conversation-3.html","title":{"rendered":"Conversation with a Colleague about Inerrancy (Part 3)"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

Here is the final installment in this series of posts allowing you to listen in on a conversation that I had with a colleague about biblical inerrancy (although I expect that our conversation will continue, and so this is the \u201cfinal installment\u201d of this part of it):<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

COLLEAGUE<\/p>\n

What evidence from the Bible led you to abandon inerrancy?<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

JAMES<\/p>\n

It was the sheer accumulation of examples of problems, contradictions, and\/or human fallibility that changed my mind \u2013 not because it isn\u2019t always possible to come up with some explanation of how a given passage doesn\u2019t really mean what it appears to in those cases, but precisely because I was allowing my doctrine about the Bible to dictate what the Bible was or was not allowed to mean. The biblical texts could shout loudly \u201cI\u2019m a fallible book written by human beings\u201d and I would find a way of explaining that in a manner that safeguarded inerrancy. Eventually I realized that, in the very act of\u00a0doing so, the Bible was not serving as\u00a0my ultimate authority.<\/p>\n

Examples include:<\/p>\n