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  • #16
    So from what I gathered infallibility means trustowrthy. The bible is trustworthy.
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    • #17
      So am I understanding the issue?
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      • #18
        Originally posted by Apologiaphoenix View Post
        I just take it to mean that the Bible is without error on what it teaches.
        And yet, a very liberal Christian might say that they believe that the Bible is without error in what it teaches. I think Biblical inerrancy goes a bit beyond that though. Biblical inerrancy is the idea that, if one takes into consideration things like literary style, figures of speech (including metaphor and phenomenology), cultural expressions, and fluidity in grammar, and recitation, the Bible's divinely inspired authors were without error in everything they wrote, including doctrine, morality, history, cosmology, geography, and the like.

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        • #19
          No problem Adrift. I think hypothetically a liberal could say they agree with Inerrancy. I think a Jehovah's Witness would say they do.

          I don't think Inerrancy itself says much about hermeneutics, but it does mean that if you have a proper hermeneutic, you will get truth out of the Bible.

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          • #20
            Originally posted by TheWall View Post
            So am I understanding the issue?
            You more or less have it, but, while not the most complicated concept in Christianity, it's not a particularly easy one either. Lots of people over the ages have struggled to nail down exactly what inerrancy entails. So, for instance, some people see no distinction between inerrancy and infallibility, some do. Some people have defined inerrancy so that it's so vague as to be almost meaningless, others have defined it so strictly that it would make reading the Bible incomprehensible. The early Christians, and the Jews before them seem to have always understood the Bible to be inerrant (Gregg Allison has a decent yet short write up on the history of inerrancy in his "Historical Theology: An Introduction to Christian Doctrine"), but it's only recently, maybe within the last 300 years or so, that we've attempted to really nail down the concept. The Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy is one of the most recent, most thorough, and most widely recognized definitions of inerrancy. It's a definition that's come under a bit of attack recently, but it's the definition of inerrancy that I mostly agree with.



            Concerning infallibility, I don't think you have it quite right. Again, some don't really distinguish between the two, but generally speaking, to say that something is inerrant is to say that it is without error. But to say that something is infallible is to say that it is incapable of error. So, it's sort of in the name. Infallibility has to do "ability". Some say that to say that something is "infallible" is much more strict than to say that something is "inerrant". Others point out that you can't really have inerrancy without infallibility. So, while what the fallible authors of the Bible wrote down turned out to be inerrant, the Holy Spirit that divinely inspired the authors (without overtaking their will or their personality in that inspiration) was/is Himself infallible.
            Last edited by Adrift; 04-07-2017, 10:38 PM.

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            • #21
              Originally posted by Apologiaphoenix View Post
              No problem Adrift. I think hypothetically a liberal could say they agree with Inerrancy. I think a Jehovah's Witness would say they do.

              I don't think Inerrancy itself says much about hermeneutics, but it does mean that if you have a proper hermeneutic, you will get truth out of the Bible.
              The fact that liberal Christians have little to no regard for inerrancy is one of their distinguishing traits though, wouldn't you say? That's not quite the same as a Jehovah Witness, who accepts that the Bible is, in fact, inerrant, regardless of how wrong they may be in their interpretation of the Bible.

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              • #22
                I've not heard that definition of "infallibility." The one I'm familiar with makes it distinct from most versions of "inerrancy," roughly as follows: "Inerrancy" holds that Scripture makes no factual errors; "infallibility" holds that while Scripture may contain factual errors, it does not err in matters of doctrine.

                As for "inerrancy" -- Apart from KJVO folks, the definitions I'm familiar with apply only to the original mss. But those are long gone. It does not apply to transmission, translation, or interpretation. Even if the originals were totally free of errors, we don't have that same assurance about copies in the same language, we don't have that assurance about conversion to other languages, and we don't have any guarantees about which interpretations, and interpretive *methods*, if any, are correct. Given those limitations, how important is the idea really?
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                • #23
                  Originally posted by NorrinRadd View Post
                  I've not heard that definition of "infallibility." The one I'm familiar with makes it distinct from most versions of "inerrancy," roughly as follows: "Inerrancy" holds that Scripture makes no factual errors; "infallibility" holds that while Scripture may contain factual errors, it does not err in matters of doctrine.
                  Hmm. I don't think I've heard that definition of infallible. Here are some definitions I'm more familiar with,

                  Source: Systematic Theology Vol. 1, by Vincent Cheung

                  The INFALLIBILITY of Scripture refers to the impossibility of error or an inability to err - the Bible cannot err. On the other hand, the INERRANCY of Scripture emphasizes that the Bible does not err. The former refers to the potential, while the latter address the actual state of affairs. Now, it is possible for a person to be fallible but produce a text that is free from error. The possibility of error does not guarantee error. People who are capable of making mistakes nonetheless do not constantly make mistakes. Thus infallibility implies inerrancy, but inerrancy does not necessarily imply infallibility. Therefore, strictly speaking, infallibility is the stronger word, and it entails inerrancy, but sometimes the two are interchangeable in usage. In any case, since our position is that the Bible cannot err and that it does not err, we say that it is both infallible and inerrant.

                  © Copyright Original Source



                  Source: Doctrine of Revelation (part 6), Transcript of William Lane Craig's Defenders 2 class

                  And then here is its brief explanation of Infallibility, Inerrancy, and Interpretation:

                  Holy Scripture, as the inspired Word of God witnessing authoritatively to Jesus Christ, may properly be called infallible and inerrant. These negative terms have a special value, for they explicitly safeguard crucial positive truths.

                  Infallible signifies the quality of neither misleading nor being misled and so safeguards in categorical terms the truth that Holy Scripture is a sure, safe, and reliable rule and guide in all matters.

                  Similarly, inerrant signifies the quality of being free from all falsehood or mistake and so safeguards the truth that Holy Scripture is entirely true and trustworthy in all its assertions.

                  We affirm that canonical Scripture should always be interpreted on the basis that it is infallible and inerrant. However, in determining what the God-taught writer is asserting in each passage, we must pay the most careful attention to its claims and character as a human production. In inspiration, God utilized the culture and conventions of His penman’s milieu, a milieu that God controls in His sovereign providence; it is misinterpretation to imagine otherwise.

                  © Copyright Original Source



                  Originally posted by NorrinRadd View Post
                  As for "inerrancy" -- Apart from KJVO folks, the definitions I'm familiar with apply only to the original mss. But those are long gone. It does not apply to transmission, translation, or interpretation. Even if the originals were totally free of errors, we don't have that same assurance about copies in the same language, we don't have that assurance about conversion to other languages, and we don't have any guarantees about which interpretations, and interpretive *methods*, if any, are correct.
                  Agreed.

                  Originally posted by NorrinRadd View Post
                  Given those limitations, how important is the idea really?
                  I think it's still very important. But we've had this discussion before.

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                  • #24
                    I was thinking recently that inerrancy isn't an idea you arrive at by simply analyzing the bible. If you took a team of people who worked as political fact-checkers (or somesuch) and set them to fact-checking the bible, they would obvious find a lot of "apparent" errors: Historical errors; Passages that given contradictory accounts of the same events; Conflicting moral teachings; etc. The bible doesn't look like it's inerrant to any sort of neutral and unbiased observer who is simply assessing it for accuracy. If you were stuck on a desert island and ran across the bible in the bushes and had never heard of it before, and you had a read through of it a few times while waiting for rescue since you had nothing else to do, you wouldn't naturally reach any sort of conclusion that it was inerrant.

                    Instead inerrancy is something that people have faith in and then project onto the bible. Their faith in inerrancy is what tells them not to believe their lying eyes when they come across a historical error in the bible. It's what tells them when two passages give different different numerical values for the same thing, that this must be a copyist error. It's what tells them that when two different passages give very different accounts of the same event that some sort of super-complex narrative that fits them all together in complicated ways must be what really happened. And when moral teachings appear to contradict then the apologists can be called in to wax theological and give such a complex explanation of how black is white and up is down that nobody can even remember what was being discussed in the first place.

                    But I think the single biggest problem with inerrancy is actually quite different: the hermenuetical damage it does to reading the bible accurately. It does two distinct types of hermenuetical damage. Firstly it destroys the "what did the author mean when they wrote this?" hermeneutic which I consider to the be absolute touchstone of interpretation of any written document. Honest conclusions about what a particular author really meant by particular words are no longer allowed, because they might contradict another author's expressed view elsewhere, and instead inerrancy demands that we find creative ways of reinterpreting the written words in such a way that they can be interpreted to be in harmony with the written words elsewhere, regardless of what the original authors really meant by their words. Inerrancy thus makes the bible a text that we creatively read ideas into to force what we deem to be logical consistency between the written statements of different authors. Even the thought that Israel might have had a tradition of disagreeing schools of prophets and rabbis who argued with each other over what God's purposes for Israel were and what the conditions of his covenant with them was, are absolutely disallowed from the start.

                    Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, inerrancy leads to theologians making serious theological errors and causing splits within Christianity because they are too sure about the theology they have derived from the mistranslation or misunderstanding of a single word or single verse. One mistake on the part of the theologian about a single word can be all that it takes, and they know from inerrancy that even if only one verse says it, then it must be true, so they go forth and proclaim their idea as the Truth, sure that it is the very word of God because they found it in a single verse. Perhaps one way of describing it is: Their theologies are not robust with respect to errors in their own translations and own interpretations. Unfortunately the history of Christian theological debates and splits is littered with those who have taken one verse or one word wrong translated and run too far with it. One of the more infamous mistakes was Augustine relying on his incorrect Latin translation of Romans 5:12 that said all had sinned "in" Adam, and which convinced Augustine to believe that all humans are morally guilty of Adam's sin, and led to his invention of the teachings known as "original sin" and "original guilt" (which are absent from Eastern Orthodox Christian doctrine that doesn't descend from Augustine) and his ideas on these subjects had quite a large impact on Western Christianity, as Augustine was by far the single most influential church father on the medieval Catholic theologians and writers. It is my own personal contention that protestantism is not at all robust with respect to its questionable interpretations of certain theological keywords (faith, grace, justification) whose definition goes back to the 1500s and which have not been appropriately updated to reflect modern scholarship as to the meaning of the Greek words, nor is protestantism robust with respect to its over-reliance on certain 'key' verses to 'prove' that all humans fall short of the standard required by God. I think inerrancy blinds people to seeing the lack of robustness in their theologies, because they feel that if they can find a single verse that they think says what they want, then they can believe that thing to be true, even in the face of a couple of dozen verses that appear to say differently.
                    "I hate him passionately", he's "a demonic force" - Tucker Carlson, in private, on Donald Trump
                    "Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism" - George Orwell
                    "[Capitalism] as it exists today is, in my opinion, the real source of evils. I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy" - Albert Einstein

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                    • #25
                      Originally posted by Adrift View Post
                      The fact that liberal Christians have little to no regard for inerrancy is one of their distinguishing traits though, wouldn't you say? That's not quite the same as a Jehovah Witness, who accepts that the Bible is, in fact, inerrant, regardless of how wrong they may be in their interpretation of the Bible.
                      Sure, although there are some who are not "liberal" but just have serious doubts and questions about inerrancy. I think it's more often a modern inerrancy than the contextualized one I hold to.

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                      • #26
                        Both Infallibility and inerrancy are founded in God being infallible and inerrant. So God's word whether merely spoken or also written by His command would be both infallible and inerrant.

                        When it comes to God`s written word, infallibility and inerrancy is not vested in the reader of His word, nor in the translations of His word, and not in the copies made since the original writing of His word.

                        Infallibility = not being capable of error.
                        Inerrance = without having error.
                        . . . the gospel of Christ: for it is the power of God unto salvation to every one that believeth; . . . -- Romans 1:16 KJV

                        . . . that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures; And that he was buried, and that he rose again the third day according to the scriptures: . . . -- 1 Corinthians 15:3-4 KJV

                        Whosoever believeth that Jesus is the Christ is born of God: . . . -- 1 John 5:1 KJV

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                        • #27
                          Originally posted by 37818 View Post
                          Both Infallibility and inerrancy are founded in God being infallible and inerrant. So God's word whether merely spoken or also written by His command would be both infallible and inerrant.
                          But you then need to take a leap and claim that the Bible is the word of God... the bible contains some sentences that are claims by various prophets that God was speaking to them and thus are words from God and if those claims happen to be accurate then those sentences would be infallible and inerrant according to your logic, but that is a far cry from the bible itself being the infallible and inerrant word of God. According to one passage in the bible, it is Jesus that is the word of God.
                          "I hate him passionately", he's "a demonic force" - Tucker Carlson, in private, on Donald Trump
                          "Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism" - George Orwell
                          "[Capitalism] as it exists today is, in my opinion, the real source of evils. I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy" - Albert Einstein

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                          • #28
                            Re post 24, Starlight

                            Not in 100% agreement on all points, but it is certainly an excellent overview.

                            The ability of a number of people to affirm the inerrancy of the Bible even when faced with the factual and ineluctable existence of errors never ceases to amaze me.

                            ETA

                            Mind if I pinch a copy? It will make a good opener for Bible Studies.
                            Last edited by tabibito; 04-08-2017, 07:24 PM.
                            1Cor 15:34 Come to your senses as you ought and stop sinning; for I say to your shame, there are some who know not God.
                            .
                            ⊛⊛⊛⊛⊛⊛⊛⊛⊛⊛⊛⊛⊛⊛⊛⊛⊛⊛⊛⊛⊛⊛
                            Scripture before Tradition:
                            but that won't prevent others from
                            taking it upon themselves to deprive you
                            of the right to call yourself Christian.

                            ⊛⊛⊛⊛⊛⊛⊛⊛⊛⊛⊛⊛⊛⊛⊛⊛⊛⊛⊛⊛⊛

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                            • #29
                              There are some scholars out there who do not hold to inerrancy who are probably more conservative than some who do hold to inerrancy. Glenn Peoples is an excellent example of one such person. He has a high view of the text and is conservative on most doctrines, but does not identify as inerrantist. Some who hold to similar positions may identify as inerrantists but qualify the term "inerrancy" so much that it is relatively meaningless.
                              "I am not angered that the Moral Majority boys campaign against abortion. I am angry when the same men who say, "Save OUR children" bellow "Build more and bigger bombers." That's right! Blast the children in other nations into eternity, or limbless misery as they lay crippled from "OUR" bombers! This does not jell." - Leonard Ravenhill

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                              • #30
                                Originally posted by tabibito View Post
                                The ability of a number of people to affirm the inerrancy of the Bible even when faced with the factual and ineluctable existence of errors never ceases to amaze me.
                                Yup, same.

                                Mind if I pinch a copy? It will make a good opener for Bible Studies.
                                Go for it. Feel free to use it in whole or in part without attribution, however you see fit.
                                "I hate him passionately", he's "a demonic force" - Tucker Carlson, in private, on Donald Trump
                                "Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism" - George Orwell
                                "[Capitalism] as it exists today is, in my opinion, the real source of evils. I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy" - Albert Einstein

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