Inerrancy and Biblical Authority: How and Why Old-Earth Inerrantists Are Unintentionally Undermining Inerrancy

….about how a lot of people who deny inerrancy in fact will never deny it straightforwardly in words. I remember learning this in no uncertain terms when discussing an ELCA document about human sexuality in the 1990s that was dispensing, really, with most Biblical positions on sexuality. Even a straightforward contradiction was not enough to get my friend to admit that he really didn’t believe the Bible in these matters—there is somewhere a “workaround” based in the torture of literary devices by which they think they can rescue what they’re saying.

So while some do actually deny Scripture, it’s far more common, in my experience, to see people torturing the text out of relevance.

Bert wrote:

So while some do actually deny Scripture, it’s far more common, in my experience, to see people torturing the text out of relevance.

Yes, Bert, you are right. In my experience, people outside the evangelical church will do that, but then eventually say something really dumb, like “we follow Jesus, not Paul.”

Within evangelicalism, they will feign that their strained “interpretations” are completely valid, but sometimes it is hard to believe that they really believe that they are being fair with the text, down deep. The evangelical world has a lot of adherents who really do not like the teachings of evangelical churches, IMO. They want to fix and change things. Strange mix.

….”This type only comes out with prayer and fasting.” Put a bit more seriously, there is a fine line between a legitimate difference of opinion and the torturing of a text until it confesses something it never wanted to say. I would dare say that I also pray that I do not fall into this trap.