Richard Hall on Biblical inerrancy:
In short, the Bible is inspired by God, of the utmost value to anyone who wants to live according to the will of God but it should not be read as an infallible “guide to everything”. Taking the Bible seriously means reading what it says, not what we want it to say and it is clear that the scriptures themselves do not claim infallibility. This is my first rule in the use of the Bible - it should teach us, not the other way around! It is very easy to come to the Bible knowing what it says, and finding ourselves confirmed by it. It is much more challenging to read it and allow the scriptures to speak for themselves.
The whole article is worth reading, but that, in my opinion, is the money paragraph.
I attend an evangelical church and in most areas see the scriptures (though not politics) through that lens. But I have never been able to subscribe to the concept of “Biblical inerrancy.”
Richard’s understanding seems dead on to me. What is important is not that we accept every word in the scriptures as inerrant, but rather that we choose to learn from the scriptures what they have to teach us - whether or not the author dotted all of his Is and crossed all of his Ts. And more importantly, whether or not we like what they have to say.
