Inerrancy and Scissors

Walter: Even the most fundamentalist of Protestant inerrantists approach the bible like it is a buffet from which they take what they want or need and leave the rest on the table. The truth is that most believers are mentally snipping out sections of the bible that they find hard to believe or morally distasteful. Did Jonah really live three days in the belly of a fish? No, that's just crazy. Did our heavenly Father really order the brutal deaths of women and children? That can't be right.


If you are an "errantist," then in reality you are implicitly doing the same thing Jefferson did overtly with a pair of scissors.

I think Christians would say that even parts that are not taken in a purely literal way are edifying and do have a role in God's inspired message. So they aren't snipping them out exactly, but they are assigning somewhat of a different role to them within the framework of a broadly inspired Scripture, even where the narrow content is, strictly speaking, incorrect.

I think even people who would say they believe in inerrancy do this.


One example of this would be the message of some portions of Deuteronomy and the Wisdom literature that, in the course of earthly life (and there is no robust belief in heaven or hell through most of the OT), that righteousness is rewarded and evil punished on earth. If there's a God then something like this has to be true, but if you restrict your vision to earthly life, it looks pretty obviously false, as books like Job forcefully point out. Narrowly speaking, you can't say "God said it, I believe it, that settles it", and yet it is part of a message which, taken as a whole, is thought to be inspired.

Interestingly enough, debunkers of Christianity really rely on the sort of "inerrancy-or-chaos" argument used by fundamentalists against compromising inerrancy. In his chapter on Ancient Near Eastern cosmology in The Christian Delusion, Ed Babinski lays out the prescientific cosmology of the Old Testament. What of course is going to be the reaction from just about anybody except the AIG crowd, is to ask why we should expect God to give us lots of good science lessons and straighten out our cosmology in inspiring the Bible.