In some evangelical apologetic circles there's a pronounced aversion to inerrancy. What accounts for the resistance to inerrancy–and is it reasonable?
1. An obvious motive for a Christian apologist to reject in errancy is that he has less to defend. When an atheist challenges him on some "problem passage" of Scripture, he can always say the Bible might be wrong about that, and his faith doesn't hinge on Scripture getting everything right. So this strategy minimizes his defensive flank. It relieves him of having to defend the Bible on so many fronts, which can be daunting or intellectually exhausting.
In addition, it's not just a question of apologetic strategy. It may seem to be a way to protect his own faith as his struggles with "problem passages" in the Bible. So rejecting inerrancy can be very appealing. It makes everything so much easier.
2. At a time, moreover, when Christian faith is controversial and subject to persecution, rejecting inerrancy enables professing Christians to go soft on hot-bottom social issues.
3. However, that's a problem. It makes things too easy. If you feel free not to defend this or that teaching of Scripture, then what do you defend? It becomes completely arbitrary, based on convenience.
This can also backfire in terms of apologetic strategy. On the one hand there's the claim that we should avoid putting unnecessary stumbling blocks in the way of seekers. If, on the other hand, a seeker notices that a Christian folds whenever something in the Bible is challenged, it will be hard to take Christian faith seriously. They don't stand for anything. When you push them, there's no pushback. You just keep pushing them until they fall over. So what's the basis, if any, for their beliefs?
4. What is the point of the Bible if not to provide reliable guidance for God's people until the end of the church age? A public record for the benefit of posterity. A public revelation for Christians at every time and place. A roadmap through life into heaven. But if it's fallible and apt to lead us astray at different junctures, is it not worse than useless? Like a watch that's sometimes fast and sometimes slow. Too unpredictable to be on time. Either you're too late or too early. You miss connections. It fails to tell you what you need to know when you need to know it. So you're really on your own.
5. In addition, the Bible is supposed to be challenging. If you dissolve all the difficulties by writing them off as mistakes, then you will have a very superficial understanding of Scripture. And you won't let it change you.
6. Why are there Christians who say they believe in a God who sometimes speaks to people, answers prayer, and performs miracles, but doesn't inspire the Bible to give all Christians a common standard of comparison? Why the reluctance to grant divine agency in the composition of Scripture? Why can God do other things but leave that hanging in midair? They seem to view God as friendly uncle who pops in unexpectedly, but is absent most of the time. Not even working behind-the-scenes.
7. The Bible says there are damnable sins. If so, then the stakes could not be higher, and the actual wording of Scripture is often of paramount importance.
8. Many scholars say the Gospels give us the gist of what Jesus said rather than a verbatim transcript. No doubt that's true some of the time, but the issue is more complex. For one thing, important issues sometimes turn on the exact wording of what Jesus said. For instance, did Jesus say there are exceptions for divorce? That's a very practical issue in Christian ethics and pastoral ministry.
Or what did Jesus say about himself? Take the famous "I am" sayings. Are those verbatim quotes–or did the narrator embellish them or even invent them?
9. In addition, there's a fundamental difference between saying the narrator gave us the inspired gist of what Jesus said, and the narrator gave us the gist because that's he or his sources or informants remember. To say the Gospels give us the gist of what Jesus said because, to the best of somebody recollection, that's all they remember, isn't very reliable. They may omit key qualifications or substitute misleading synonyms. The gist can be crucially inaccurate if it's just somebody's fallible passing memory.
Indeed, accuracy is even more important when summarizing what was said rather than quoting them verbatim. If you have the full verbatim statement to go by, that gives you more context. But because a summary is abbreviated, what is included or excluded from the summary is critical to the meaning and accuracy or inaccuracy of the summery.
That's very different from the gist in the sense of an inspired summary of what Jesus said. It's not the gist of what he said because the narrator must rely on faded memories.
10. If Jesus had a stump speech, and you followed him around, hearing him deliver variations on the same stump speech day after day or week after week, your recollection might be a close verbal approximation to the original. But the Gospels also contain many unique speeches and conversations. These were occasioned by one-time encounters. Unrepeated speeches and conversations. And the dialogues are complicated because they build on what each speaker says to the other. There's a cut and thrust and flow that's hard to remember in detail. Consider digressions in the dialogue between Jesus and Nicodemus or Jesus and the Samaritan woman, or the caustic debate in John 9. It's hard to simplify. These aren't reducible to catchy self-contained adages, like a Buddhist pundit. Rather, they grow out of each other.
11. Then there's the phenomenon of the omniscient narrator. An omniscient narrator is a shadowy observer. An invisible witness to everything he relates. He sees everything but no one sees him. Not only does he see and hear what others say and do, but he reads their minds. He overhears their unspoken thoughts.
In some cases we can postulate the unstated presence of witness or informant. In some cases we can postulate that what an individual thought or did in private he later shared with a friend, which the narrator somehow got hold off. But the phenomenon of the omniscient narrator in the Gospels (and Scripture generally) is too pervasive for that to be a plausible general explanation. Either the ubiquity of the omniscient narrator is a stock convention of fiction or else the narrator is privy to inspiration and direct revelation. That's the only realistic explanation. And there's no reason a Christian should balk at that explanation.
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