Thinking to Believe

Those who deny inerrancy end up replacing the authority of the Bible with their own authority because they get to determine which parts of the Bible are divinely inspired and which are not. The process is almost entirely subjective.

The tendency is to deny the inspiration of any part of Scripture that does not line up with what they think is true. When the Bible’s sexual ethics conflict with their sexual ethic, it is because those texts reflect man’s opinion rather than God’s. When the Bible’s teaching seems to conflict with the current scientific consensus, it is because those teachings are not inspired. When the Bible portrays God doing something that conflicts with their understanding of God, those passages must reflect man’s ideas rather than God’s. In the end, the Bible (and Christianity) is remade into their own image. When God just so happens to endorse everything you already believe, you’ve probably got the wrong God.

The doctrine of inerrancy holds that the original manuscripts of Scripture were inspired by God, and thus inerrant.  Both Christians and skeptics alike have questioned the rationality and utility of the doctrine in light of the fact that we do not possess those manuscripts, and the manuscripts we do possess contain errors.

Regarding the rationality of the doctrine, why God would extend His power to inspire every word down to the very case and voice only to immediately allow some of those words to be garbled by the first few scribes who copied the inerrant text?  Why extend your power to create an inerrant text if you’re not also going to extend your power to preserve it in the same inerrant fashion?

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I’ve been reading through the book of Proverbs with my wife.  I’ve noticed something in the text that clues me into the history of the book, and poses interesting questions for the doctrine of Biblical inspiration.  

The book opens with the words, “The proverbs of Solomon, son of David, king of Israel” (Proverbs 1:1, ESV).  These words read like the words of an editor, not Solomon himself.  They were added by the individual(s) who compiled Solomon’s proverbs and edited them into the form and order we see in our Bibles.  There is reason to believe, however, that this collection of Solomonic proverbs consisted only of the first nine chapters.  Proverbs 10:1 reads, “The proverbs of Solomon.”  If the introduction to the book of Proverbs tells us these are the proverbs of Solomon, why mention this again unless (1) there had been a shift in authors from Solomon to someone else somewhere between chapter one and chapter nine, or (2) if the proverbs beginning with chapter 10 were not part of the original collection of proverbs.  There is no indication of a change in authorship between chapter one and chapter nine, so it follows that chapter 10 begins a new collection of Solomonic proverbs that was not part of the original collection.  How long did the first collection circulate before this second collection was added?  We do not know, but clearly enough time elapsed that when the new collection was added to the first, it was important to preface the collection by noting that these, too, were the proverbs of Solomon.  

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