Well, this essay is about the Bible, about what different Christians (especially different Baptists) believe about the Bible. I’ll start by giving a basic (but accurate) definition of “conservative,” “moderate,” and “liberal.”

“Conservative,” first of all, is a rough synonym to “fundamentalist.” A conservative is basically someone who believes that the Bible is inerrant, that is: without error. Period.

"Moderate" would by equivalent to "centrist." I’ve met people who like "centrist" much better because it has less political connotation. In general, I think many moderates are influenced to some extent by the Swiss theologian Karl Barth, from the 1900's (starting between World War One and World War Two, as I recall). At least it’s pretty safe to say that most Barth-ians are "moderate" in their doctrine of Scripture. Karl Barth is at most the founder of 'Neo-Orthodoxy' and at least he's pretty much the same in his theology and therefore representative of Neo-Orthodoxy; depends on which book you read. We'll go into the Barth-ian doctrine of Scripture a couple of paragraphs later. The gist of it is that these people say that the Bible is not "inerrant" but is nevertheless "trustworthy." Like I said, explanation is a few paragraphs down.

“Liberal,” would probably say that the Bible really is errant, that is, incorrect. It’s not the word of God; it’s the record of fallible humans in a spiritual quest, or . . . something.

The Southern Baptist Convention is conservative, along with the Southern Baptists of Texas Convention. DBU is aligned with the Baptist General Convention of Texas, which is probably part conservative, part moderate. The Cooperative Baptist Fellowship is apparently liberal) and the Baptist World Alliance is a collection of several groups of all sorts, but overall it’s probably mostly moderate.

The belief that Scripture is inerrant would generally be best put by the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy. (Dr. Bell from the College of Christian Faith participated in this.) Here’s what is meant by the Bible not being inerrant: The Bible is inerrant according to the intention of the human author in the original autographs. The autograph refers to the actual sheepskin Paul wrote on; the original; Scripture is not inerrant in the surviving manuscripts, much less in the translations built off of those manuscripts. However, we have so many thousands of surviving manuscripts that we can reconstruct a 99%-accurate copy of the original.

It is an abuse of inerrancy to think that the surviving manuscripts are inerrant. Only the originals, the autographs, are inerrant. It is a misunderstanding of the theory to say that this is a problem. The usual argument is pretty simple: it says that since we have, say, hundreds of manuscripts for Plato’s Republic (a great book) and no one really worries if we have the right book, we have no problem with Scripture. We have thousands upon thousands of good manuscripts, and they agree to a remarkable extent. Disagreement rarely is very important, almost never affecting any important doctrine.

It is also an abuse of inerrancy to think that the English translations are inerrant. They are not. What the author (Paul, David, Moses, John, etc.) said in Greek or Hebrew or Aramaic is inerrant. Our translations are fallible. EG, the King James Version has some translation errors. This principle leads to the hermeneutical principle (hermeneutics = the science or art of Biblical interpretation) that the original languages are to be given priority. People without knowledge of Hebrew and Greek can read the Scriptures with confidence that what they are reading is true, but the interpretation of someone who knows Greek and Hebrew is usually given priority.

Before I say anything else about Karl Barth and "Neo-Orthodoxy," I should point out that this name is given to them by inerrantists. The "Neo-Orthodox" are wont to say that inerrancy is not the orthodox position, and theirs is. In any case, the prefix neo, which reminds one how badly the Wachowski dudes ruined everything in the second film, . . . indicates that they have a basically orthodox belief about the Atonement and the Incarnation and the virgin birth and things, but they’re a new sort of orthodoxy that has the right beliefs for different reasons, and furthermore has all of the right beliefs except their belief about Scripture. I should also say that I think Barth was a neat guy in many ways, and even if we disagree with him on the Bible there are probably still many things we can learn from him in other areas.

Their belief is that Scripture is not "inerrant." This is not because it is "errant." Here’s the deal: it's not the Word of God. It's man's written record of the Word of God (Christ). The Bible is not God's revelation to us. It's man's account of God's revelation to us. As such it is essential to getting to God; however, it is not in itself infallible.

Here's where it gets fun. Even though it's not the inerrant word of God, it is "trustworthy" in that it can not lead you astray. It may lead you to God. Sometimes while you’re reading it, it becomes the Word of God for you when you meet Jesus (Jesus, the Word of God, John 1:1-14) in the pages of it. Jesus is the rule of hermeneutics; whatever Jesus tells me about the text, is true. Jesus can tell me a passage is true; Jesus can tell me it's not true. This happens while I'm reading it, when the text becomes the Word of God for me at that time. It's all very mystical.

So the Bible is critically important, yet is not always a book we can look at to figure out what to do in any situation it addresses. It contains the Word of God; it is not the perfect word of God.

For instance, the very fun discussion of whether women should be pastors. I haven't studied Paul's writing on this matter myself, but the official conservative position seems to agree with many moderates that Paul actually said in the Bible that women can’t be pastors, or can’t have spiritual authority over a man or whatever. The conservatives take that and say, "Well, the Bible said it, so that's our rule."

The moderates, seemingly because of the influence of Karl Barth, say something like: "Paul said it, but he's not an infallible guy and we need to look at what's more in line with Christian love and some of the other parts of the Bible, so we can see that what Paul said here is not necessarily always true. Not if it's not in line with the teachings of Jesus. It doesn't have to be true for us. (It doesn’t have to be true for the Baptist General Convention of Texas.)"

I think the basic argument against inerrancy can generally be described as drawing from David Hume’s argument against miracles. Liberals might say that miracles are impossible. Moderates might say that because of the one-time nature of events like the resurrection, these things are inaccessible to us; therefore we can’t trust Scripture to just tell us what happened; we have to read it and maybe God will have the Bible it to lead us to the Truth/Jesus Christ while we’re reading it.

I don’t know much about that, but I can tell you that Hume’s argument is circular. Miracles are defined as interruptions in the natural order; there is only the natural order; therefore, they are not real. Something like that. I’m not well-qualified to talk about the argument against inerrancy in much detail. But look at this (unbiased) way of looking at the problem in question:

1. We don’t know if miracles are real or not.

2. Seemingly historically accurate writers claim to have seen miracles.

3. Miracles do happen.

Hume uses something like “Miracles are impossible” for number 1, so of course he ends up thinking that Scripture is not accurate. A Christian could use something like “God exists so miracles can happen” for number 1, so he’d end up with what he started with. The Neo-Orthodox, as far as I can tell, allow Hume to keep his number 1 before they look at Scripture. So they end up separating truth into two separate categories, historical truth and spiritual truth (see the section on Schaeffer.

Alright, this is more like it; I can handle this. There are three or four possibilities for really good arguments that I am aware of:

1. Inerrancy is the historical position of the church. This argument requires a lot of research because, at best, the doctrine of inerrancy was in an embryonic or inchoate form before Modernism and people like Hume. I have not done the research.

2. Not affirming inerrancy is a slippery slope; that is, if you can’t trust the entire Bible (such as Paul’s teaching on female pastors), how can you trust the rest of Scripture? How can you trust the book of Proverbs and the prologue to the gospel of John? Doesn’t it all have to be trustworthy, or none of it be trustworthy?

(This argument does not prove that Scripture really is inerrant, but it does prove that we should act like it because we don’t know when it’s not, and we don’t want to be guilty of resisting its commands.)

3. I just know that Scripture is inerrant. You can say along with the philosopher Alvin Plantinga something like, “It is a properly basic belief for me that Scripture is inerrant. The belief has warrant for me because it is produced by my mental faculties functioning properly in the environment in which they were intended to function.

A slight extension of this is to say, "God told me".

Number 3 is not easy to prove to someone else but arguments like this are almost impossible to disprove. Hume won’t do.

Francis Schaeffer offers a very interesting critique of Neo-Orthodoxy, for instance in the books in his trilogy. Schaeffer claims that Neo-Orthodoxy is basically orthodoxy without a foundation (ask me or Dr. Bell to draw a diagram for you on a napkin in the cafeteria someday). It’s like . . . it’s like Karl Barth and the Neo-Orthodox keep all the right spiritual truth (hence the “orthodoxy” in “neo-orthodoxy”) but they divorce it from its historical accuracy (hence the “neo” in neo-orthodoxy, a new sort of orthodoxy) when they say that the Bible is not “inerrant” just because it’s not a normal historical text. (Of course, Schaeffer doesn’t think it is merely a normal historical text.)

Schaeffer’s critique is well worth contemplating.

A very legitimate charge is leveled against certain 'Fundamentalists.' That is that we idolize the Bible. Here's the argument against bibliolatry . . . God is infinite. The Bible reveals truths about an infinite God to finite beings (that would be us). Therefore, the Bible does not contain the full extent of complete and accurate truth as God knows it. It contains the sort of watered-down truth that is communicated from an infinite God to a finite human being.

Here are three ways to avoid bibliolatry.

First, remember that even though most of us probably believe that all the Bible is truth, not all truth is in the Bible. For instance, the Bible doesn't tell us a thing about the nervous systems of mosquitos. Science will tell us that.

Second, remember that the truth that is in the Bible is not always fully comprehensible to us. "Jesus died by crucifixion" or "David slew 200 Phillistines" is easy to understand. But "God became flesh" opens up no end of mystery.

Third. The doctrine of inerrancy means that what the authors of the Bible are trying to say is never wrong. It does not mean that what the authors of the Bible are trying to say is the only meaning of the Bible.

Let me give you some examples of this. What I'm trying to point out is that, if inerrancy applies to the author's intent, it doesn't mean that the meaning of the text is limited to the human author's intent. So when Isaiah says that the young woman will give birth to a son, he means that his wife will have a son before Samaria gets wasted by Assyria (or whatever). But it also means that the virgin Mary will give birth to Jesus Christ in a couple of hundred years. To take the classic example of whether women should take pastoral positions, we inerrantists would say that Scripture may mean many things that the human author didn't necessarily intend, but it can never mean something directly opposed to what any of the human authors intended.

Like the Head Snipe said in "Defense of Fundamentalism," why should the Bible have to not be inerrant in order for us to go through the text and meet Christ-the-Word-of-God while we're reading it? (I helped the Head Snipe on that essay by advising him on some of the relevant books to link to).