Defending Biblical Inerrancy

John DePoe has a brief, but helpful post dealing with the problem of inerrancy here. He is responding to another post by Maverick Philosopher, who has serious reservations about the idea. Some readers may scoff, but I have to take sides with DePoe. My view would be that the autographs are without error in whatever they assert. (That is a key phrase.) I haven't taken the time to delve into the briar patch that surrounds inerrancy, but I suspect that I'm probably a little naive when it comes to this subject, especially after reading some of the discussion that followed Valicella's post. The arguments get pretty thorny, and I still need to sort through them.

If you have deep concerns about the doctrine, you can gnaw on this meaty essay by J.P. Moreland (also linked at John's site). It's more philosophically oriented, addressing the question of whether it is rational to believe in inerrancy, rather than simply asking if the doctrine is true or false. These are two very different questions, since it is fairly easy to approximate an answer to the former one, but much more arduous for the latter.

People have asked me, from time to time, what it means to be an evangelical. I would say that inerrancy is a distinctive feature of evangelical thought, and often demarcates "us" from "them." ("Them," of course, refers to the set of any and all bad people.)