[Dave]

Originally Posted by OBW

Dave,

And what is inerrant? If it merely means that it is telling us what God wants to tell us, then I am OK with it. But if it means that the sentence structure and every particular word is seriously important to it, and I have to buy into your (a generic "your") version of what it means, I have no use for it. I am convinced that we are too engrossed in getting all the doctrines right and almost ignoring getting the life right. Too much Orthodoxy at the expense of Orthopraxy. Surely we have to believe. But I thought the idea was to believe in Jesus, not 5-point Calvinism, believer baptism, pre-tribulation rapture (whatever that means), etc. Just suggest that you don't really care about one of those and you risk excommunication.

Too many hoops. Nothing that would commend it to the faith of "little children."

The Bible's Inerrancy refers to those who hold that the Bible (66 books) is the Word of God and every Word was written under the inspiration of God but there are different views of this. Since we know that NT scholars are not using the original manuscripts of the NT since they no longer exist there is some disagreement as to what was written and who wrote what. Most scholars agree that 1 John 5:7-8 was inserted by scribes to prove the Trinity but whether it would be difficult for that doctrine to be proved without those scriptures is another matter. In any case, some of the newer versions of the Bible don't include those verses (e.g. NSRV). Of course, the "inspired word of God" was written in Greek in the NT and Hebrew in the OT and I guess some people believe that as these Greek books are translated into English etc the translators are inspired so their translations are accurate when we read them.