You don't realize this, but at the turn of the 20th century,
scholars made fun of the Bible all the time, because of its mention of Hittites in Canaan.
You know, "the Bible's a funny document. Look at that! Who's the idiot that wrote that?!"
Well, yeah, utill we found source material that had Hittites in Canaan, you know.
Could you give us a definition of inerrancy, infallibility, and inspiration?
Yeah, I think, you know, inerrancy, again, is one of those things that
everybody gets to define. And I'm no different,
so I'm going to have my own definition here. I think inerrancy relates to
the trustworthiness and reliability of the truth propositions being given
to the reader and the recounting.
In other words, I look at inerrancy as sort of being
reliable when it comes to historical matters, because to ma that's a good word
and a workable word "trustworthy and reliable,"
because it doesn't overclaim. Okay, I'm not going to use a term
that would suggest that we might not learn something in the future.
Or that there might be a different or better way of understanding
this or that thing,
because again, we're dealing with limited data and whatnot.
But when the biblical writer is writing this down, recording whatever he's recording,
I think his entire intent is to be reliable in the things he's recounting.
But I will say it's not going to conform in certain respects to what
we would expect a historian today to do, or historians today would expect to do.
And my own view is that that's unnecessary.
It is unnecessary for me to take my modern context of how we do history
and impose it on the biblical writer and then judge the results,
according to the failure to live up to my standard that I imposed.
I think that's wrongheaded. You know, for me to call something an error in Scripture,
it would have to be something that there's really just no other way,
and there's no other conclusion to draw, you know, he said, A and it's B.
And there's really no sort of getting out of it. It's a mistake or something like that.
But you realize, you know, when you get into this discussion,
for instance, is the Bible allowed to use approximations?
Let's just take numbers for instance.
Like there's a particular battle in the Old Testament, one accounting says 24,000 died.
Another one says, like, 23,000, you know, like, is it okay if the writer uses a round number?
He rounds off? Is that a sin? Is that an intent to deceive? Is it an intent to falsify?
Okay, so all these these considerations, it's hard to just give one sentence for inerrancy.
Because you have all these qualifications: is the biblical writer allowed to use
the language of appearances? We do this every day, "the sun rose." No, it didn't.
It's an expression everybody understands, but it's scientifically inaccurate.
But it's acceptable within our culture. So is the biblical writer allowed to use these sorts
of things and write from a perspective that doesn't conform to modern science?
I mean, you already know my answer to this.
This is why I distinguish between truth propositions and the means by which
propositions are expressed.
The means by which propositions are expressed, are going to be things
that from our perspective don't reflect the tools that we have of scientific inquiry.
So I'm not going to impose my context, my knowledge base of the natural world
on this ancient person, because I don't think the truth proposition is to tell me,
"oh, Genesis 3, let's discuss snake anatomy.
You know, let's discuss the zoology of snakes or let's..."
I don't think that's the point at all. I think the truth proposition being given to us
is something theological that helps frame the history of Israel or salvation history in general,
or whatever. And these are the means by which the writer is trying to do that.
That's his goal.
The truth propositions are the goal, not the way he's trying to express it.
Because this can change. This is sort of a human thing. It's who the person is.
It's not something that transcends. So that's the way I look at inerrancy.
I've not come across anything that I would consider it is just an out and out error.
I mean, there are things that you have to wonder about and sort of suspend judgment
like in the past. And we can always come up with these sorts of things, like Quirinius
is kind of a famous problem, the census of Quirinius in Luke.
There are good explanations as to how that can be historically plausible.
There's a couple of them. Now, I don't know if either one of those are right.
Or if there's another way that will come along down the pike, that would be better.
But I can't conclude, since there are possibilities of showing that he's accurate here.
I can't conclude that it's an error.
Even if we can't nail down what explanation is best here.
So that's the kind of thing we're okay. We'll just sit on it. We'll sit on it.
You know, I believe that we're going to have when these sorts of situations apply.
In the past things have come to light that have settled questions.
You don't realize this, but at the turn of the 20th century, scholars
made fun of the Bible all the time, because of its mentioned
of Hittites in Canaan.
You know, "the Bible is a funny document. Look at that! Who's the idiot that wrote that?"
Well, yeah, utill we found source material that had Hittites in Canaan. You know,
this is what you get. So you have the flow of history at times will produce answers
to these sorts of things. And since that's been the case in the past,
I'm going to say okay, Quirinius could be historical for one of these two explanations.
Could work. I don't know if these are the best answers or not,
maybe something better will come along, but there you go.
I can't conclude that Luke is wrong, that would be overclaiming
and really missclaiming the data. It's unwarranted