When we talk about the truthfulness and authoritativeness of the Bible, does that necessarily lead us to “verbal plenary inspiration” and “inerrancy”? When Jesus says that not one “jot or tittle” of the law will pass away, is this not a hyperbolic statement telling us simply that God’s purposes and word do not change? Should we press this literally any more than we would press literally the equally hyperbolic statements of Christ about “plucking out your eye”?

When we criticize the neoorthodox who talks about the Bible becoming the word of God in the life of a person when he or she reads it and the Holy Spirit applies it to their lives, are we right? Isn’t this also what we believe? Is this any less or weaker a statement about biblical authority? Is not inerrancy too often just a theoretical construct with limited relevancy or applicability? We don’t even have original texts and what we have are demonstrably NOT inerrant, yet we don’t question their authoritativeness despite that fact.

Are we right to insist that absolute flawlessness is required, because otherwise it all becomes questionable a bit of an overstatement? Isn’t there a matter of degree? And isn’t the flawlessness we’re talking about more an artifact of our perfectionistic, measurephilic and accuracy-dependent culture (not bad things at all, and necessary artifacts of the sort of technological world we are a part of and enjoy) than it is an objective requirement to preserve the authority of the Bible? When we need to measure distances to the last nanometer and have zero tolerance for error, when we can measure time so accurately that we become aware of the imprecision of the very length of a day due to variations in the rotation speed of the Earth itself, can we escape the fact that our culture is coloring how we perceive the biblical record, produced and used by pre-industrial, pre-technological cultures?

We are very uncomfortable with fuzziness, with less than black and white and absolute clarity, and yet, I think the question “is the Bible inerrant” may be a question akin to when my four year old asked me, “Is little Bunny Fu-fu a boy or a girl.” It is an irrelevant and meaningless question that the text is not interested in answering, and that no one thought about one way or another. What is certain about the Bible is that it is authoritative for life and practice and for doctrine. The question of the inerrancy of the Bible, in reality, is a hypothetical question. The actual text we have is not inerrant, but it is no less authoritative as a consequence. We should, instead, concentrate on the authority of scripture, and its work of transformation in the lives of individuals. We preach Christ and him crucified, not bibliology.

Legalism in the area of biblical authority is no more justified than legalism anywhere. The fuzziness of morality presented by Paul in Romans 14 remains a discomfort to all those who expect everything to be simple, black and white, and lacking in any possibility of disagreement.

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