Quote:
Originally Posted by asaris
Loganmule -- Your Section 10 is actually exactly what it means when people claim the Bible is inerrant. "Infallible" is the position that the Bible doesn't get history or science wrong.
That being said, there's another claim which always makes me nervous. That is the idea of the Bible being entirely culturally situated. Even if it's merely inerrant, or even slightly less than that, it still has a certain amount of authority, and we shouldn't be too quick to dismiss something merely on the grounds of 'well, that only applies to their cultural situation'. My general rule of thumb is that I feel free to disregard specific instructions if I can discern a general principle behind the specific instruction. A good example is the directions regarding how a woman ought to dress. This is pretty clearly culturally bound; but there's a general principle that people ought not to dress ostentatiously which is not so culturally bound.
However, this also means that if there's no such general principle behind it, I'm not going to reject it as merely a cultural artifact. A good example is the issue of woman pastors. There are statements in the Bible that seem to say that churches cannot have female pastors. Now, there are good arguments that these statements don't actually mean that. But a bad argument, actually for a number of reasons, is that this merely reflects a patriarchal cultural bias on the part of the authors. Because we take the Bible seriously, we ought to give its human authors the benefit of the doubt.
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I think others, asaris, and particularly fundamentalist Christians, would take issue with your distinction between "inerrant" and "infallible". My brother, for example, who attends an independent Baptist church that, in his words, takes a "biblical" approach, believes that all statements of occurrences are to be accepted as literally true, and he attributes this to its inerrancy. You and I are on the same page, if you consider section 10 of the cited text to define inerrancy. That said, I think most would disagree with us, including Merriam-Webster, which defines the term to mean "exemption from error" and mentions infallibility as a synonym:
http://www.m-w.com/dictionary/inerrancy
Your concluding statement left me scratching my head, and maybe you could follow up on that. It doesn't seem to follow logically that because we take scripture seriously, we therefore should give its authors the benefit of the doubt. What is it about our serious view of scripture which gives its authors a pass on all of those factors which normally would be taken into account, in evaluating the weight and credibility what they have written?