Monday, June 16, 2008

An Inerrant Bible

I was wandering about the internet recently and stumbled across the web site of an "missional" church by the name of Kaleo. As I often do I checked out their statement of faith. In it they say:

"We believe the Holy Bible consisting of the Old and New Testament Scriptures to be the verbally inspired Word of God, the final authority for faith and life, inerrant in the original writings, and infallible"

While this is a pretty common statement found in most conservative/fundamentalist churches (and probably many of the emergent/missional churches as well), what they fail to address is that minor little problem of no original writings being in existence. I don't understand how it even makes sense to make this statement with no original writings around and none likely to be found.


They go on to say: "the Bible is our tool to know and understand who God is according to His own self-description; it is our tool to grow in faith and maturity and to learn the promises that God has given us. We take it literally. God's truth is the anchor for our souls. It calls us to dive deep into God and there discover His blessings and the transformation He brings to our lives, our church, and our world."

I do agree with this (except for the taking it literally part). God's truth surely is the anchor for our souls.

4 comments:

the Reverend boy said...

Hmmm ... In my personal experience, having Baptist and some Pentecostal roots before joining the Episcopal Church, "taking the Bible literally" generally means "we have this particular interpretation of what scripture means."

That being said, I do like their statement in the second part of your post, minus the "we take it literally" part.

Robert said...

I think you are exactly right! Thanks for wandering over here and posting Rev Boy.

Fran said...

In our scripture study at my church we have spent a lot of time discussing both the literal and literalistic issues of interpretation.

Being Catholics we have a mix of people who literally (could not resist sorry) have not ever cracked open a Bible, we have those who are more literal (Gosh - thanks Mother Angelica!) and some who are just longing to know more.

I am away from home and don't have the document handy, but the Vatican (shocking) has actually had some wise things to stay about literalism.

We need The Word and the Word is organic, evolutionary and alive - that is one of my biggest issues with flat out literalism. It just feels like it leaves no room for God to breathe.

What is the old saying - all stories are true. And some of them actually even happened that way.

Robert said...

Thanks Fran. It would be great if you could post some of that Vatican information when you have some time and can lay your hands on it. I think it would be interesting.