2. Fox in the Hen House! – BioLogos Rejects Inerrancy

Continuing the Fox in the Hen House! series of blog posts exposing heresy about Genesis …

These false teachers lead people astray concerning Genesis and concerning New Testament teaching based on Genesis, even to the point of subverting the Gospel.

The heretics include respected scholars claiming to be evangelicals. They question the truth of Scripture and undermine the doctrines of the divine inspiration and inerrancy of the Bible.

This series of reports focuses primarily on scholars associated with the BioLogos Foundation. BioLogos is committed to the marriage of scientism and Christianity through persuading Christians to accept evolution and billions of years for the age of the earth.

Throughout the course of these posts I will show from scholars’ own writings and lectures that they teach and promote heresy by demeaning, undermining, and denying Scripture.

This second post of the series exposes the position of BioLogos on the inerrancy of the Bible.

What is Inerrancy?
Inerrancy means “no error”. It is the doctrine that the Bible as originally written was error-free.

Scripture is the Word of Almighty God, the Creator, Ruler, and Sustainer of the universe. As such it is inerrant and authoritative. This means it is without error on everything about which it speaks, and it speaks either directly or indirectly about everything. “Authoritative” means man is required to obey it.

This is the historic position of the Christian Church. It is an obvious corollary of Biblical teaching that Scripture is “God-breathed” (2 Timothy 3:16).

BioLogos and Inerrancy
BioLogos argues that Christians should abandon Biblical inerrancy and recognize that the Bible’s authors communicated an incorrect perspective on origins.

The position of BioLogos on Biblical inerrancy is communicated in this essay on the BioLogos website by Eastern University Professor of Biblical Studies Kenton Sparks:
“After Inerrancy: Evangelicals and the Bible in a Postmodern Age” (June 2010).

The essay describes the church’s historic commitment to Biblical inerrancy as misguided, wrong, and intellectually indefensible. Sparks calls on the evangelical church to abandon inerrancy and to recognize that the Biblical authors erred. Here are some quotes from the essay that convey its tenor and message against Biblical inerrancy.

“Many Evangelicals would like to include Biblicist inerrancy in any list of dogmatic assumptions, but this dogma is neither a standard view among Christians at-large nor is it theologically sensible in light of the strong evidence against it.” (p 1)

“If Jesus as a finite human being erred from time to time, there is no reason at all to suppose that Moses, Paul, John wrote Scripture without error.” (p 7)

“The Bible ostensibly suggests the earth is a few thousand years old, yet science that tells us it is billions of years old. The Bible says human beings were created on day 6 of a six-day creation process, and science that tells us human beings were created through a complex evolutionary process that took millions of years. The Bible claims that there was a worldwide flood, and geological and biological evidence proves that this never happened.” (p 3)

“If we take the Bible’s explicit content with any seriousness, then it is as clear as it can possibly be that its authors were not wholly consistent with each other, nor does it appear that they were wholly right about all matters of science and history.” (p 3)

“Scripture exhibits all of the telltale signs of having been written by finite, fallen human beings who erred in the ways that human beings usually err. If this is the case, in what sense can we say with a straight face that Scripture is God’s word? … it is clear that inerrancy is an intellectual disaster.” (p 5)

“Just as we can maintain that the created order is God’s good creation warped by the fall, in a similar way we can maintain that Scripture—given through and to a fallen world through fallen men—is both beautiful and broken. No less than the creation, Scripture’s human authors, and the book that they wrote, stand in need of redemption.” (p 11)

“A healthy use of Scripture should recognize that theology can by no means depend on Scripture only. … Christian theology, as it reads and seeks to follow Scripture, must be ready to move beyond Scripture in some cases. And when it does so, this theological move is not foreign to the Bible but rather invited by it. That is, paradoxical as it might sound, it’s quite Biblical to go beyond the Bible.” (p 16)

“Christian approaches to theology and scholarly inquiry should never pit “God’s word in Scripture” against ‘human science.’ Rather, we must listen carefully to what God has said through the sacred but broken Bible and to what he is saying through his beautiful but broken world.” (p 16)

Conclusion
These quotes convey a clear message opposing Biblical inerrancy. Many of the subsequent blog posts in this series will bear on this issue also, for whenever someone denies the clear teaching of Scripture, they implicitly oppose inerrancy.

Scripture repeatedly claims to be authoritative truth from God, and this is how Jesus Himself viewed Scripture. For example,
All Scripture is inspired by God (2 Tim 3:16)
Thy word is truth (John 17:17 – words of Jesus)
The sum of Thy word is truth (Psalm 119:160)
And He said to him, “What is written in the Law? How does it read to you?” (Luke 10:26)
“But regarding the resurrection of the dead, have you not read that which was spoken to you by God, saying, … (Matthew 22:31)
And He answered and said, “Have you not read, that He who created them from the beginning MADE THEM MALE AND FEMALE, and said, ‘FOR THIS CAUSE A MAN SHALL LEAVE HIS FATHER AND MOTHER, AND SHALL CLEAVE TO HIS WIFE; AND THE TWO SHALL BECOME ONE FLESH’? (Matthew 19:4-5)

When one attacks the truth and authority of the Word, as BioLogos does, one is attacking the One who breathed out that Word. Not a good place to be.
Soli Deo Gloria.

Read the prequel in this Fox in the Hen House! series of blog posts exposing
heresy about Genesis:
1. Fox in the Hen House! – BioLogos Promotes Heresy

Read the sequel:
3. Fox in the Hen House! – Colleges Compromise on Genesis

©William T. Pelletier, Ph.D.
“contending earnestly for the faith” (Jude 1:3)
Tuesday April 19, 2011 A.D.

Read my April 2011 Bible-Science column
Is There Alien Life in Space?.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being by Him, and apart from Him nothing came into being that has come into being. … And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us, and we beheld His glory, glory as of the only begotten from the Father, full of grace and truth. (John 1:1-3, 14)