Reality and Scripture
Is scripture inerrant? How do we know? --these questions incite arguments among believers, and now we have three houses: those who think scripture inerrant, those who don't think scripture inerrant, and those who don't want to argue about the question.
For a some time now, I've found myself in the third house. But this could be changing.
My reasoning for not wanting to argue went like this: there's too much we don't know about scripture, in its origins, its permutations through the course of history, and its context. No, I don't intent to use the term "context" as a signifier of postmodernist leanings, so if you flinch from the word, I invite you to relax, at least temporarily. In fact, this leads to my next point: we Christians who differ tend to stop listening to one another, and dismiss quickly the reasoning with which we disagree. So many of us, including me, have taken the stance of not knowing, or not listening: why even discuss scripture and its errant/inerrant status, if we don't know and can't agree?
Recently I may have stumbled to an answer: the stakes are huge. If a Christian believes that scripture is inerrant, they hold themselves to follow every word, and to believe that the words are, in a sense, frozen in meaning, because otherwise the slippery slope of postmodernism would cave in beneath believers' feet and tumble us into the chasm of doubt. The other slippery slope lurking beneath the feet of those who think scripture is "errant" has been explained to me this way: if scripture can err, if the words are faulty, or variably interprable, or prey to differing schools of hermeneutics, or hostage to reader-response, or situated in a context we current readers cannot know, then anybody could twist the words to mean anything.
This is a problem. Why wouldn't the Lord choose the inerrant route for his scriptures? it would make sense. Why leave so much room for doubt, argument, twisting of words?
In the next post, I'll go forward with this. Now, it's about a hundred degrees in here, and I recently returned from eight solid weeks of musicmaking, so I need to take a little breather.
Is scripture inerrant? How do we know? --these questions incite arguments among believers, and now we have three houses: those who think scripture inerrant, those who don't think scripture inerrant, and those who don't want to argue about the question.
For a some time now, I've found myself in the third house. But this could be changing.
My reasoning for not wanting to argue went like this: there's too much we don't know about scripture, in its origins, its permutations through the course of history, and its context. No, I don't intent to use the term "context" as a signifier of postmodernist leanings, so if you flinch from the word, I invite you to relax, at least temporarily. In fact, this leads to my next point: we Christians who differ tend to stop listening to one another, and dismiss quickly the reasoning with which we disagree. So many of us, including me, have taken the stance of not knowing, or not listening: why even discuss scripture and its errant/inerrant status, if we don't know and can't agree?
Recently I may have stumbled to an answer: the stakes are huge. If a Christian believes that scripture is inerrant, they hold themselves to follow every word, and to believe that the words are, in a sense, frozen in meaning, because otherwise the slippery slope of postmodernism would cave in beneath believers' feet and tumble us into the chasm of doubt. The other slippery slope lurking beneath the feet of those who think scripture is "errant" has been explained to me this way: if scripture can err, if the words are faulty, or variably interprable, or prey to differing schools of hermeneutics, or hostage to reader-response, or situated in a context we current readers cannot know, then anybody could twist the words to mean anything.
This is a problem. Why wouldn't the Lord choose the inerrant route for his scriptures? it would make sense. Why leave so much room for doubt, argument, twisting of words?
In the next post, I'll go forward with this. Now, it's about a hundred degrees in here, and I recently returned from eight solid weeks of musicmaking, so I need to take a little breather.
posted by Vicky at 5:07 PM
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