Inerrancy and Scripturalism

A stock objection to the inerrancy of Scripture alleges contradictions in the Gospels. For instance, Bart Ehrman has a list of canned objections. Ehrman seems to operate with a crude, Harold Lindsell concept of what inerrancy entails.

A standard way of harmonizing the Gospels is to make allowance for the fact that the authors often omit details, foreshorten events, paraphrase sayings, and rearrange the order of events. Seeing an event is different than writing about it. Seeing an event is an immersive experience. In writing about it, you must adapt to a different medium. You can't directly reproduce the experience in writing. 

In addition, we use our imagination to visualize what might have happened. In our mind's eye, we consider different ways of ordering incidents and dialogues in time and space. That's a way of demonstrating how variant accounts could be harmonious. Who said what when and where? In principle, there's more than one way that could take place. That creates room for harmonizing variant accounts. 

It isn't clear to me that Scripturalism can defend the Gospels against allegations of inconsistency. For Scripturalism, truth is reducible to Biblical propositions. All you've got to work with are the verbalized propositions in the four Gospels. That's it. Yet that is what is alleged to generate the contradictions in the first place.

Scripturalists can't go outside Scripture to create conceptual space between Biblical propositions, to demonstrate how alleged contradictions are reconcilable. They lack that flexibility, because their only source of knowledge begins and ends with Scripture itself. They can't use their imagination to visualize a scene that's reported in two or more Gospels, to fill in the gaps. They can't explore different ways in which to place narrative descriptions in a larger spacial or temporal framework, to consider alternative sequences that successfully combine what two or more Gospels describe, when there are apparent discrepancies in parallel accounts.

In other words, when you read the four Gospels horizontally, differences become conspicuous. Yet differences are all the Scripturalist has to go on. There's no play, no give, because there's nothing over and above the Gospels to work with. He can't use his extrascriptural imagination to put people, places, incidents, and dialogues in a broader timeline. He can't explore different alternative arrangements. When someone like Ehrman attacks the mutual consistency of the four Gospels, I don't think Scripturalists can show how those might fit together. 

Perhaps it's a waste of time for me to comment on Scripturalism. I don't know how many Scripturalists there are, world wide. Especially in the age of the Internet, it's a way some people are introduced to philosophy and Calvinism.