HQ

I once went to a Don Fransisco show. I am now old enough to admit that I enjoyed it and persuaded my mother to buy a copy of  One Heart at a Time . Somehow a memory of the concert sprung to mind recently so I started following him on facebook. Apparently, Don has no time for facebook. His wife runs his social media for him. Recently, Wendy Fransisco went on the attack against the doctrine of inerrancy. She gave a number of arguments that struck me as being common fare among those who deny the doctrine. First up, Wendy presents the following: ...we are not inerrantists. The reason is that 4 decades of international itinerant travel demonstrated the vast variety of the body of Christ, many churches claiming inerrancy, NONE of them agreeing on what scripture says or means, and NO two churches having the same doctrines even within the same denomination.  The argument is as follows: If the Bible is innerrant, then there would be no disagreement about what it says...

Christians claim that the Bible is not just like any other book. It is a book that is said to be divinely inspired. God moved the human authors to write books that contain the content God intends to communicate without entirely bypassing the human author. What follows from this? Let's say it's true. What properties does a divinely inspired book have that other books may not have? The very least we can say is that if scripture is divinely inspired then what scripture asserts is true. [22]  God cannot lie or be mistaken in any claim he makes. If the Bible is divinely inspired then everything it affirms as true is a statement God intended the human author to make. The uniqueness of this feature of the Bible is well illustrated by Plantinga: Scripture itself is taken to be a wholly authoritative and trustworthy guide to faith and morals; it is authoritative and trustworthy, because it is a revelation from God, a matter of God's speaking to us. Once it is clear, therefore, ...

The recent Evangelical Theological Society conference was about biblical inerancy. Some are for it, some are against. What strikes me is that the doctrine, while raising all sorts of questions, is not that complicated. So let me have a shot at a simple defense. The first thing to realize is that we know God because God reveals himself to us. Revelation is “God’s disclosure of His nature and His will to mankind.” There are two kinds of revelation, general and special. General revelation is general information about God - he exists, he is powerful that is generally available to all human beings. In Scripture we learn that all Creation reveals God (Psalm 19) and that all human beings know God (Rom 1). Special Revelation is specific revelation, through specific means, Jesus Christ (John 1:14) or spoken words (2 Samuel 23:2), that is available to specific people, Israel, the church. The Bible, Christians believe, is special revelation, inspired by God, devoid of error and author...