A Word of Warning

Even 99-44/100% is not enough

Jonathan Noyes and Greg Koukl at Stand to Reason got together recently to produce an excellent post on the subject of the inerrancy of scripture. It’s lengthy, but well worth the time it takes to work through. Full credit to the apologists for doing their job. It’s severely needed these days, especially among the younger generation in our churches.

But in setting out why inerrancy matters and what the scripture claims about itself, Noyes and Koukl include a word of warning about the inerrancy argument that I think is worth taking to heart: they believe the Lord never intended us to debate inerrancy with the skeptics of our generation.

Inerrancy and Trust

Andy Stanley has taken a fair bit of flack for statements like this one about the inerrancy of scripture:

“When a specific view of inspiration is elevated to the status of doctrine, the Bible becomes an obstacle to faith for some.”

Critics have called Stanley everything from a liberal to a heretic, as Jared Wilson documents here. I can’t speak to the heresy part. I’ve read Stanley’s Irresistible, and you can find the critical commentary it inspired on our Book Reviews page. I think it’s misguided, sometimes gratuitously flippant and outright wrong in places, but I wouldn’t call it heretical in the sense that it would cause me to question Stanley’s devotion to Christ and his people, or his general orthodoxy.

Anonymous Asks (134)

“Do I have to believe the Bible is inerrant to be saved?”

I believe the Bible is the product of men who “spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit”; that all scripture (as the Christians of the first century understood the word “scripture”) is breathed out by God and is not only profitable but fully sufficient to equip those who seek God for everything he will ever require of them. I believe the scripture cannot be broken. Its own writers claim repeatedly that God was speaking through them and that what they wrote and said was trustworthy.

Recommend-a-blog (26)

The Stand to Reason blog, a Christian online resource I’ve recommended here once or twice previously, has moved to a new domain. You can find a link to it here, midway across the banner atop the main page.

Always useful to be bookmarking the right thing!

Of the more recent posts I’d missed before discovering they’d moved, this one on inerrancy was most intriguing: Aaron Brake asks Does the Lack of Original Autographs Make Biblical Inerrancy Irrelevant?