For what it’s worth, it seems your definition of inerrancy is very different than the Chicago Statements. E.g.:
The term “inerrancy” has meaning within a particular conversation in history, around e.g. higher criticism. I think you will get much farther by understanding the term as understood by its most informed proponents. See, for example. Greg Beale.
Hello @swamidass, thanks for directing me to Beale’s work. I read one of his defenses of biblical inerrancy (linked here), and frankly, I was underwhelmed by his exegetical case for inerrancy. He essentially makes his case in the form of a syllogism:
P1. God cannot lie, and everything that He says is true (Heb. 6:18; Rev. 3:14; 21:5; 22:6).
P2. The Bible has been inspired by God (2 Tim. 3:16; 2 Pet. 1:20-21).
C. Therefore, everything the Bible says is true.
I agree with him that God cannot lie; that is a foundation of the Christian faith (or any theistic faith for that matter). However, I find his premise 2 to be unsupported, and even if it were true, his argument seems to be a non sequitur. 2 Timothy 3:16 and 2 Peter 1:20-21 do not say that the parts of the Bible which touch on science and history are inspired, but that the Scripture is “useful for doctrine” and morality, and that the OT prophets were “led by the Holy Spirit.”
There are also passages that say, for example, “the word of our God endures forever” (Isa. 40:8). But to take this as referring to the entire Bible is circular reasoning, since it only refers to the entire Bible if the entire Bible is inspired and inerrant. Edit: after doing a quick search for “word,” “God,” and “Lord” throughout the Bible, it seems that the “word of God” and similar phrases are only used for the Law, God’s direct communication (i.e. prophecy), and the gospel (in the NT).
So if we take these passages at their word rather than adding the (apparently biblically unsupported) notion that all Scripture is inspired, his syllogism should be reformulated like this:
P1. God cannot lie, and everything that He says is true (Heb. 6:18; Rev. 3:14; 21:5; 22:6).
P2. The Bible’s teachings on doctrine, morality, and prophecy have been inspired by God (2 Tim. 3:16; 2 Pet. 1:20-21).
C. Therefore, everything the Bible says about doctrine, morality, and prophecy is true.
However, even this argument seems to be a non sequitur, since it takes a specific view of inspiration that might not be correct. Inspiration only entails inerrancy if the Bible was simply dictated by God without any input from its human author. If not, inerrancy could still be true, but it is not entailed.
Inerrancy also seems to have problems with some passages in the Bible. For example, what about passages like 2 Samuel 1:18, which cite non-inspired sources? Are we supposed to assume that God also inspired parts of the ‘Book of Jasher’ to make sure that no falsehoods made it into the Bible? And if so, where is the biblical support for this?
Or what about Deuteronomy 24:1? Is this verse inerrant? Jesus Himself didn’t seem to think so, as He said that this law was God’s accommodation to fallible human culture (Matt. 19:8; Mk. 10:5). Isn’t Jesus’ own teaching more important than a notion of inerrancy that isn’t even clearly articulated in the Bible?
In addition to these biblical issues with inerrancy, I have epistemological objections to it. Unless one is a presuppositionalist who takes biblical inerrancy as an irreducible fact, the Bible is only as trustworthy as the evidence that supports it. You might believe the Bible because of the historical evidence for the Resurrection and your own personal experience with Jesus. As powerful as those evidences are (which I’m not disputing at all), they aren’t 100% certain; it could be an elaborate hallucination or simulation, for example.
So why should we take the Bible as 100% certain when the evidence for the Bible is only 99.99% certain? From an epistemological standpoint, it’s untenable to hold a belief like that. I don’t think that God would want us (or worse, force us) to hold an impossible belief such as that. But according to many (although perhaps not most) Evangelicals, biblical inerrancy is absolutely nonnegotiable.
I’m still not sure where I stand on all this. Even though I just wrote all that out against inerrancy, I think I’m still leaning toward inerrancy, at least for passages that deal with doctrine; it seems clear to me that God doesn’t compromise on theology, only on points peripheral to the Bible’s purpose, like the existence of the firmament. These are just some of the doubts that I’ve been having. If I’m terribly off the mark, hopefully you or @AllenWitmerMiller or any of our other resident Bible scholars can correct me.
It’s a misunderstanding to think it’s an exegetical case that he is making or is to be made. Rather, there is a conversation that’s been happening, and inerrancy is one position in that conversation, shaped in a great deal as a response to higher criticism.
I’m not sure I understand. If the basis for biblical inerrancy isn’t exegetical, what is it?
@Swamidass, I was browsing the archives of the BioLogos forum to see other perspectives on this issue, and I found that you had written this in 2017:
You argument is actually an affirmation of inerrancy too, but taking a better option. You write…
For as I have said before (and quite frankly am tired of saying), God could not have spoken using highly advanced scientific terminology, for to ancient peoples this would have seemed absurd, and they would see him as a deceptive God unworthy of worship. In order to get his message to spread, God would have had to have spoken in the language of his time.
You are articulating here the principle of “accommodation.”
When we identify Scripture using the understanding the people of the time, we can legitimately assert that this is not what Scripture teaches. If it is not the affirmation or teaching of Scripture, than we are not imputing error on to the testimony of Scripture. So this article is an argument for inerrancy.
I’m confused, because I thought that this was the view I was articulating before, and yet you said “it seems your definition of inerrancy is very different than the Chicago Statements.” Was I just not clear that I was describing divine accommodation? Or have you changed your views on accommodation?
“Inerrancy” in the Chicago Statements includes a robust affirmation of accommodation. My comments at BioLogos are close to what I’m saying to you, and notably many people at BioLogos are hostile to it (see that thread! 
).
You wrote, for example,
That’s an example of a definition/use of “inerrancy” at odds with the meaning laid out in the Chicago Statements. You can use it that way if you like, but it isn’t what informed inerrantists mean by “inerrancy.” We would not grant that the Bible is “errant” in these cases.
As I explained already:
It helps to know history here.
I see. How would you word it better? Inerrancy seems to be defined generally as the view that the Bible is true “in all it affirms,” so are you saying that the Bible just does not “affirm” the scientific errors that they (the human author) make? What about when fallible, uninspired human sources are used within the Bible (e.g. 2 Sam. 1:18)? How can you discern when the Bible is or is not “affirming” something?
The idea that the Bible is merely using terminology understood by the people at the time, rather than making statements of fact, is of course complete invention. It also isn’t clear why God couldn’t have stated things in ways that were easy to understand without getting overly complicated: All living things developed from smaller and simpler things over enormous periods of time, the stars are like the sun but very far away. Somehow they just couldn’t have fathomed such concepts back then? I doubt it.
Or the Bible was simply never meant to be a revelation of scientific truth. It never claims to be, and it would almost certainly have been a stumbling block to the faith of these ancient people if God had completely overturned their understanding of the natural world.
God should have overturned certain ideas at the time which led to dangerous practices such as the belief that the presence of the hymen is a good indicator of whether a woman has had sex or not. The Jews may have borrowed this idea from their neighbors, but there was nothing stopping God (who is supposed to fully understand female reproductive biology better) from getting them to see it’s deep problems.
Indeed. The Hindus seem to have had no problems with great ages for the world, so I don’t see why the Hebrews couldn’t have handled that.
It seems very clear to me that the Bible presents itself as a collection of documents written by humans. There are passages claiming to be the Word of God, but even they are second hand at best. The idea that the entire Bible is the Word of God seems to be at odds with the text. Which really doesn’t make sense if it were true.
I just don’t buy that and it really just sounds like bad excuses for why the creation story, as written, is factually incorrect. Why even have it, then? What message does it convey that could not have been conveyed better by a divine superintelligence who supposedly planned how our minds would function?
And why would people find it a stumbling block to their faith if God reveals how he supposedly created them? “Developed from simpler forms of life over eons of time according to His plan” doesn’t sound like a stumbling block to me.
On another note we KNOW as solidly and surely as we know anything at all, that there NEVER existed such a thing as a witch. Witchcraft is impossible bs that never occurred. And yet the book says to never allow them to live. And people have died as a result. God has commanded to kill a group of people who never existed?
It would have been mind-blowing today if the Jews held this idea right from time as a general belief about the origin of humans. However, like the rest of their pagan neighbors, they went along with the idea it all began with poof!
I would say that these are examples where “Scripture can be considered inerrant (and trustworthy), as explained in detail in the Chicago Statements.”
It’s important to remember that “inerrancy”, for better or worse, is a highly technical term that does not always align with naive or untutored use of the term. Spending time with scholars such as @kkeathley and @deuteroKJ, and reading the Lausanne Covenant, the Chicago Statements and Beale have made that very clear to me.
It is also an institutionally important term. So there are consequences to sloppy conflation of the technical meaning with the naive understanding of the term.
Please explain. Virtually every language has idioms, “terminology understood by the people at the time”, which are NOT necessarily understood as “making statements of fact.”
For example, in modern English, “raining cats and dogs” is common terminology for heavy rainfall but I don’t know any native speaker who assumes it a statement of fact.
We also speak of “giving someone the cold shoulder” and “putting one’s foot in one’s mouth.” Both are statements of fact of a sort but NOT at all what a literal interpretation of the words might suggest.
I’m certainly not defending a lot of the wild contortions some “inerrancy traditionalists” try to impose upon the Biblical texts. But ancient hermeneutics involves many linguistic and genre complexities with which many readers struggle and mangle even though they would rarely make the same errors in their own native language.
This is a great thread topic and I hope to devote some time to it once I get some other pressing matters and projects out of the way.
Somewhat related to this thread’s topic, is there anyone here who advocates an ahistorical view of Adam, like that of Peter Enns or of Denis Lamoureux, who sees Adam as an accommodation of ancient Near Eastern creation myths? If so, how do you make sense of verses like 1 Corinthians [edit: Chronicles] 1:1 and Luke 3:38 that connect Adam genealogically to undoubtedly historical figures?
I Corinthians contains no genealogy. What were you referring to? Did you mean Matthew?
What are the chances that the writer of Luke (or Matthew, whose genealogy is different) could find an accurate genealogy of these figures? Was it important to the story that the genealogy be accurate?
There are conflicting genealogies of Jesus in Matthew and in Luke. Because of that conflict, I never took either of them seriously.
Sorry, 1 Chronicles. I get those mixed up sometimes.