After a good meeting in March about inerrancy and an interesting trip to Dallas, USA, and March (the place), UK, I have been writing and editing in an effort to add all the necessary words and to remove the unnecessary ones (I was about 100% too long after completing Part 1).
The inerrancy discussion helped me to moderate a few things, especially concerning the frictions between theological camps around the time the Chicago Statements were drawn up, since nothing occurs in a vacuum! It was helpful to realize that inerrancy was not simply a theological position but also the one part of the conservative doctrinal position that the more progressive faction wouldn’t assent to, which made it, effectively, an identity marker of conservative orthodoxy as the whole. So questioning inerrancy doesn’t just provoke a reaction because a key doctrine is being challenged; it will feel to some as though the fabric of orthodoxy itself is under threat.
The attendees were helpful in confirming that my arguments are mostly on the right track. I was pleased that my argument about the priority of the autographs (i.e., the original biblical manuscripts) registered as novel and thought-provoking. The gist of it is that inerrancy tends to be argued for by beginning with how the New Testament books were formed (or so the theory goes): The apostles (etc.) wrote the original manuscripts, which we theorize were perfect and inerrant but corrupted during transmission. The Old Testament is considered inerrant by extension–since Jesus and the apostles endorsed it, it must be of essentially the same quality. My argument is that we get our doctrine of inerrancy from statements about Scripture made by Jesus and Paul. Their Scriptures were the OT, which means whatever their doctrine of Scripture was, it must have been true of the OT first and the NT by extension. Since their era exhibited manuscript diversity, canonical differences between the LXX and MT vorlage, and so on, and since there’s very little chance that OT books had original autographs in the same way as the NT, we can’t really base inerrancy on an autographic model.
As for the future of the project, I am making good progress. I have completed Part 1 and half of the much shorter and less research-dependent Part 2. I have committed to submitting it at the end of the month, which is feeling daunting given other pressures, but it must happen!
Here’s how the contents now look:
