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Inerrancy
Inerrancy of the Bible is one of the most basic pillars of fundamentalism. The primary problem with saying scriptures are inerrant is that corrupters then claim that their interpretation is inerrant. Since no one can agree on interpretations, there cannot be any such thing as inerrancy. This is technically true of all words. They are only symbols which have vague meanings, so they can never be inerrant. Words do not convey reality from one mind to another; they only contact similar realities which already exist in minds. Reality is developed in minds through a gradual process of study and learning. It is acceptable to say Christ's words are perfect truth, because he communicated in a super-human way relating to the objective realities of life including the examples of his own life. What all of this means is that the Bible has to be taken for whatever it is worth in relation to evidence and logic. A quote in the Bible isn't truth just because someone says it is. Some authors in the Bible are more reliable and informative than others. But even then, the lying scribes did so much altering that there has to be a correct logic before the words can be attributed to the assumed author. Christ said Scriptures cannot be set aside (John 10:35). This doesn't mean Scriptures are infallible; it means Christ was building his message on the constructive elements of previous Scriptures. And it means if some elements of the Bible are used for justification, then the constructive elements of it must also be used for correcting errors, as demonstrated in Christ's dialog with the devil (Mat 4:1-11).It would almost be justifiable to say the Bible is inerrant, since words can mean anything, and within that "anything" could be the truth. You could get a truthful interpretation from any lie, if you had to. Catholics did this with Paul's theology. They rationalized it away, not allowing it to corrupt Christ's teaching (until Vatican II). They were functionally putting the Bible in the position of being inerrant while not promoting the concept of inerrancy. This allowed outdated material to be discarded, such as the need to stone an adulteress. If fundamentalists were doing this and calling it inerrancy, there would be no problem. You could just say that some of it were outdated instead of in error, or some of it were a description of history which contained errors. But that's not what fundamentalists are doing. They are saying their interpretation of the Bible cannot be in error; and no one can question their interpretation. If you just said the "words" of the Bible were inerrant, everyone could interpret them differently without corrupting their inerrancy. But interpretation never can be inerrant. Interpretation can never be inerrant, because it is a copy. Experts know that no one can produce a copy machine which is so perfect no one can tell it's a copy. There are always imperfections in the copy. Interpretations of abstract realities are far more imperfect than copy machines. Therefore, by definition, interpretations should never be referred to as inerrant. And the corruptions of fundamentalists result in the interpretations being extremely imperfect. Creationism is an example. To see biology in Genesis is a corrupt interpretation of Genesis. Fundamentalists deny it, but they certainly get the biology corrupted. They claim such absurdities as an ice age occurring during the past six thousand years. The shortest ice ages last one hundred thousand years. Then there is no record of an ice age in human inscriptions, which go back at least five thousand years. This leaves no more than one thousand years for an ice age. It's impossible for ice to accumulate and melt that fast. And if it did, there would be verbal stories about it, such as Noah's flood. Noah's flood apparently occurred ten to twelve thousand years ago, when the rising ocean level flooded either the Black Sea or some other lowlands. If fundamentalists can't interpret science any more accurately than that, they can't interpret the Bible accurately either. The Bible is more abstract than science. And there is more of a motive to misinterpret the Bible stemming from a desire to conceal and rationalize sin. So fundamentalists are not really promoting inerrancy of the Bible but inerrancy of themselves, while they are extremely errant persons. Lying Scribes Historical Evaluation (Outside Link) |