Why Inerrance Doesn't Matter

Roger Olsen, a very honest and respected theologian posted the following to his blog Roger E. Olsen. It's an example of how dysfunctional are we when mis-labeling and obfuscation are the keys to keeping one’s job in Evangelical educational institutions. Sounds like part of the Don’t Talk, Don’t Feel, and Don’t Trust Rules:

…. for most of us the word “inerrancy” has become too problematic uncritically to embrace and use.  To the untrained and untutored ear “inerrant” always and necessarily implies absolute flawless perfection even with regard to numbers and chronologies and quotations from sources, etc.  But even the strictest scholarly adherents of inerrancy kill that definition with the death of a thousand qualifications.  Some who insist that you must be evangelical to be faithful to Scripture’s authority say inerrancy is consistent with biblical authors’ use of errant sources.  In other words, they say, the Bible is nevertheless inerrant if it contains an error so long as the author used an errant source inerrantly.

How many people in the pews know about these qualifications held by many, if not all, scholarly conservative evangelicals?  When I teach these qualifications to my students (as I have done over almost 30 years) the reaction is almost uniformly the same: “That’s not what ‘inerrancy’ means!”  I have them read the Chicago Statement on Inerrancy and most of them laugh at the twists and turns it makes in order to qualify inerrancy to make it fit with the undeniable phenomena of Scripture.

The biggest qualification is that only the original autographs were inerrant.  Think about this. … (more)