Cousin Screwtape,

Your last email merely confirms my longstanding suspicion that, in spite of your skill at individual temptation, you have no head for grand Strategy. I shall continue to illuminate your stupidity, starting with the slow and steady erosion of the doctrine of inerrancy here at DBU. DBU has become its own stark antithesis, thanks to Dallas Baptist University and Dallas Baptist anti-University. But the effects of this will be negligible as long as the Christians have a high view of Scripture.

For the greater masses it will be mostly a simple case of bad hermeneutics. I’m delighted to tell you that in this we have already made great progress. We've recorded hundreds of instances in DBU’s chapel services in recent years. Taking a verse out of context is always the most natural, of course. But we have also made great strides in blurring the line between the meaning of the author’s intent and the necessary application. By having a culture that naturally jumps to the application and skips the author's intent altogether we plan to gradually make them care less and less for the intent of Scripture’s authors. Soon we hope to have DBU people consciously thinking that their application of the Bible can contradict what the Bible actually says (it already happens a little bit on a small level).

But for the scholars of theology something more advanced will be required. Of course it would be ideal if they would all just believe in David Hume's objections to the miraculous; we may get there, in time. But we shall naturally have to first take them to the mediating view of Karl Barth, if not something a little bit more mediating than even that. Our plan involves taking five steps towards this end.

First, we want the humans to think that it's a problem to accept inerrancy on faith--all the while accepting the tenets of Christian orthodoxy without the most reasonable basis imaginable, an inerrant set of documents defining Christianity.

Second, it is the case that there are so many competing definitions of "inerrancy," and we want the humans to think that it's quite natural to choose none of them because there are so many from which to choose. We don't want the Christians to think on this matter the same way they think of the choices on a menu at a Chinese restaurant, where they take the abundance of choices as a natural encouragement to choose one.

Third, we are working on making them think of a special idea of the Scriptural autographs. They should come from the direction of the theological and ask, if we want truth about God shouldn't we demand the one-hundred percent accurate original documents?–asking what they don't have (all the while distracting them from the fact that no major Christian doctrines are threatened by textual disagreement).

We can’t have them coming from the more obvious direction of asking what they do have and finding that it's far beyond the necessary minimal requirements. If they come from the direction of the textual, they might ask the question that is ever so perilous for us to have them asking: if no one cares for the missing autographs of Shakespeare, Plato, and Homer, why should we care for the missing autographs of Scripture when the New Testament has five thousands of Greek documents to Homer's hundreds?

Fourth, we want them to fall for the ridiculous idea that three or four definitions make for the death of a thousand qualifications. By this of course we mean the simple and obvious fact that autograph does not mean copy; that original does not mean translation; and that authorial intent does not include taking metaphor literally.

Fifth, we want them to think that the fact that the Bible is written by both men and God means that it must have all of the characteristics of fallen man, including the characteristic of being open to the possibility of error, and not all of the characteristics of God, in particular that characteristic of not being open to the possibility of error.

Your hideous cousin,

The Prince of a City on a Hill,

Snorglak