Biblical inerrancy: Does it matter?

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Biblical inerrancy: Does it matter?

Posted by Kathy Haigh-Hutchinson on 2000-05-04
I am increasingly finding the idea of "inerrancy" unhelpful. In fact, I
did find myself wondering if that is why we are presented with a problem
in the Genealogies in Luke and Matthew. I have heard that the problem
can be solved by saying that Luke gives the genealogy of Mary. But if it
was that easy, why is there an old tradition that Mary was the daughter
of Joachim? Doesn't Luke say that Joseph is the son of Heli?


What we don't have in the Bible is the entire history of the human race.
We don't even have the entire history of the Jewish race. King Omri was
so important in the ancient Near East that the Assyrians called Israel
the 'Land of Omni'. Yet the Bible history practically ignores him.

Inerrant or not, what we have is a very selective history.

So, working on the line that Scripture is given to us by God, and that
He has made sure that what He wanted to give us has been preserved, then
the question changes to 'Why has he given us this bit of history and not
that bit'.

The big problem I have found with the inerrancy problem is that it
reduces to a tremendous amount of theological effort given to whether or
not the world was created in 6 days, what date was the book of Ruth
written? Can we believe in a literal great fish in Jonah or an
historical Job.

And at the end of the day, when all the arguments are over and done with
we are left with a very crucial question unanswered. 'What has that got
to do with the price of eggs' 

Did God make the world in 6 days or 6 million years? Does it really
matter at the end of the day? 

I am assured by literalists that it does matter, but I am afraid I am
very difficult to convince. Does it automatically follow that if a
nought was added to ages in early Genesis then the record of a crucial
week in Jerusalem's history may not have really happened after all?

Anyone who reads secular history knows that history is written by the
winners, and is written with all sorts of agendas. There is no such
thing as an inerrant recent history. Yet historians can study all sorts
of documents and get a reasonably accurate picture of the crucial events
that shaped the present. It doesn't bother them that none of the
documents they work from are 100% accurate. 

When we read the Bible we should be reading a record of God dealing with
his people throughout history, how the people's understanding of God
developed through that relationship, and the crucial events in Salvation
History. Man's failures, God' faithfulness, God's deliverance, and
finally,  Jesus' sacrifice. It is Calvary that is the hinge, the focal
point of all human history. 


When we ask, 'Why have we been given this, Why has God preserved this
account, what does He want us to learn from it', the Bible becomes a
window to help us perceive God at work, in history, and then in our own
time and in our own life.

When we ask 'Is this bit true, can we trust this bit, do we throw this
bit out or do we believe it' then we are relating to a book not a
person. We are also arguing about minute details of millenia in the
past. Go back before Abraham and we go back at least 4000 years. Who
cared what precisely happened then? We care who directed it. We are
told, that behind everything is the hand of God. But surely it is the
broad picture that we must be concerned with. Not the tiny brush strokes
that make it up.

My rule, the older it is, the less accurate the detail is likely to be.
But none of it, absolutely none of it, can be discarded. Whatever really
happened, by telling us that we are all descendants of Adam and Eve,
(and indeed of Noah and wife), God is telling us that whatever our
differences, we are all of one flesh in His sight. And that is what He
made us to be, therefore that is what we are. He also tells us that the
disobedience that resulted in the fall of the Human race affected the
entire race. There is no 'superior class' of human uncontaminated. When
one went down, he brought the entire race down with him, because
whatever he did, we were all in some way participators. We have it in
story form, presumably we will know the full details at some stage. But
the story is vitally important, and must not be discarded.

However, searching for the Garden of Eden in Mesopotamia or for Noah's
ark on Mount Arrarat, is really missing the point wholesale. It in fact
reduces a record meant to enlighten the present to a mere record of
events millenia in the past. And what relevance do documents of long
dead ages have to anything? 

The Bible is the history of a people, and it is probably in that
respect, no more and no less reliable than any other nations history?
Did Arthur or Boadicea really exist? Did King Alfred burn the cakes? 

By making an issue of out inerrancy we are in danger of creating an
impression of Biblical irrelevance. The sooner we discard the 'What' in
favour of the 'Why' the better. HOwever God arranged the Bible to come
to us, and however accurate or cloudy the details, what we have is what
He wants us to have, for what it means throughout all of human history.

Of course, if every word of the Bible were totally fiction, then there
would be a problem in taking it seriously. I believe, at the end of the
day, we will find that there are historical events underlying Job,
Jonah, Noah  and even Adam and Eve. 

And at the end of the day, at least one of the genealogies of Jesus will
have turned out to be a mistake. If Mathew and Luke had not been so
caught up in a patriarchal society they would have cottoned on to the
fact that it is Mary's genealogy they should have been pursuing all
along. A man is only a true born Jew if his mother is a Jewess, that
should have been a clue. And who cares who Joseph's father was, since
Jesus was not his son in a biological sense. Regardless of Joseph's
lineage, Jesus could only have been born a descendant of David if Mary
was.

That is my two pennies worth.