Bible Inerrancy stands against all objections

Here is a quote of Augustine of Hippo from "The Literal Meaning of Genesis" which predates Darwin by over a thousand years. Inerrancy was not intended then or now.

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Often, a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other parts of the world, about the motions and orbits of the stars and even their sizes and distances, and this knowledge he holds with certainty from reason and experience. It is thus offensive and disgraceful for an unbeliever to hear a Christian talk nonsense about such things, claiming that what he is saying is based in Scripture. We should do all we can to avoid such an embarrassing situation, which people see as ignorance in the Christian and laugh to scorn.

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The shame is not so much that an ignorant person is laughed at, but rather that people outside the faith believe that we hold such opinions, and thus our teachings are rejected as ignorant and unlearned. If they find a Christian mistaken in a subject that they know well and hear him maintaining his foolish opinions as based on our teachings, how are they going to believe these teachings in matters concerning the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven, when they think these teachings are filled with fallacies about facts which they have learnt from experience and reason.

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Reckless and presumptuous expounders of Scripture bring about much harm when they are caught in their mischievous false opinions by those not bound by our sacred texts. And even more so when they then try to defend their rash and obviously untrue statements by quoting a shower of words from Scripture and even recite from memory passages which they think will support their case ‘without understanding either what they are saying or what they assert with such assurance.’

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Science cannot contradict the Bible as they are answering different questions. I disagree that evolution is false science, but even if it is, that still does not mean the your understanding of how to read the Bible is correct.Just a couple of thoughts. When you read the Sermon on the Mount it is clear that Jesus corrects as erroneous parts of the OT. On divorce He even goes so far as to say that it came from Moses, not from God.Also in all 3 synoptic Gospels it tells about how the Pharisees claimed that the miracles of Jesus were done through evil powers. Jesus goes on to say that ascribing that which is good to evil blasphemes the Holy Spirit.You are doing essentially the same thing. You are calling evil, (genocide and public stoning etc), good by your heretical understanding of Scripture.Incidentally in the first post you talked about me not calling the Bible the word of God. I believe that the Bible is a library of books that God uses to speak to us. However I would call it the word of God while Jesus is the "Word of God". John tells us that the logos existed from time immemorial and became flesh. He didn't say that it became a book. It's in the Bible.

Your comment was that your belief on inerrancy was there from the beginning and yet you discount Augustine who rather predates your 40 year old document. I’ve also shown you where Jesus didn’t believe in an inerrant scripture either but of course He was wrong because He doesn’t agree with you. Incidentally that doesn’t mean that he didn’t take the Scriptures seriously. In all likelihood He had them memorized. So you found some guys that agree with you which of automatically makes them authorities. Yes, He expanded on them but it does not negate the fact that he corrected what was wrong in the OT. In this case He clearly says that it was Moses who gave that commandment - not God.
Once again you make a false idol out of an inerrant Bible, putting the Bible ahead of Jesus. So genocide and public stoning for minor offences are good things. Stoning to death a poor smuck for picking up some fire wood on the Sabbath is an act of justice.
Forget the slaughter of the Canaanites for now. How about the Midianites where we can see this act of justice from Numbers 31.

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17 Now therefore, kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman who has known man intimately. 18 But all the girls who have not known man intimately, spare for yourselves.

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Your understanding of God allows for the women to be taken for the purposes of the men. Whatever can that Mean? Not much of a feminist are you.
Your brand of fundamentalism is the modern equivalent of the Pharisees of Jesus’ time. They believed that if they kept all of the myriad of laws they had come up with, that God would do all that they hoped He would do. (Defeat their enemies etc. )
The Pharisees made the following of the laws they had come up with the path to Yahweh. You make the belief in the dogma that you hold to be the path to God. You have turned faith into Salvation by works, and you don’t even have to do any work. You just have to believe the right stuff and you have instant salvation. It is totally foreign to what Jesus taught and lived, and it isn’t even scriptural. You turn a God of love, compassion, forgiveness and mercy into a small little petulant deity.

I have no doubt that I need a lot of straightening out but frankly Faith if I had to believe as you do to be a Christian I would reject Christianity in the same way that I reject Islam as modeled by fundamentalist Muslims.Your beliefs turn God into an unholy despot of situational ethics to suit His purposes. It turns Christianity from one of service and trust in God's goodness into a religion like so many others where the primary goal is to get God on to your side for one's own benefit, whether it be in this world or the next. It also becomes a religion that is something of an unholy mixture that involves religion, politics and nationalism. It is a religion that completely rejects the God given gift of intelligence. It is a religion that can ultimately be used to justify a great deal of violence.I'm sorry Faith but my Christianity is central to my life and I find it very upsetting to see it portrayed in the manner that you portray it. I give thanks that in this world you represent a small minority of Christians.

The point was simply that the Pharisees believed that God would return and look after them if they followed the myriad of laws that they had come up with.I'm suggesting that Christians such as Faith seem to believe that if people believe the right doctrine that they get eternal life.In both cases it is about trying to control God by either legalistically following laws or legalistically believing a specific doctrine.

..and that is the doctrine that you believe. That's exactly my point.

Yes, but not in the way that I believe that you understand it. You have said in the past that personal salvation is the major point of Christ dying on the cross. I see the cross and the resurrection as the launch, and the affirmation of a Kingdom movement on Earth that is charged with reflecting God's love into His creation.If Christianity is primarily about who is in and who isn't in the next life, it misses the point of what Jesus was all about. That is not to say it doesn't matter but if we follow Jesus' model of love, forgiveness, mercy, justice etc, personal salvation will take care of itself and I'll leave it up to God as to how that looks instead of worrying about it myself. As the Bible says, God will judge our hearts. It doesn't say that God will judge our doctrine.

You confuse the Kingdom message as being about personal salvation. It is about a Kingdom of people who live by Christ's commands of love. Salvation is for the whole creation. Read in Ephesians 1, Rev. 21 and others. It is about the renewal of all things. Jesus' death and resurrection are about the establishment of that renewed creation.Trivializing it is when you crunch it down to being about personal salvation. It is so much more than that. In this life God has called humans to work for the new creation by reflecting His love into it. And again, I'll leave it up to God as to how we fit into that renewed creation.

I don't want to get embroiled in this discussion but I can't resist commenting on your post ringo. I don't see your "judge not lest ye be judged" quote is applicable when it comes to capital punishment. When our courts sentences someone to life in prison we as a society are judging them and saying that what they have done is absolutely wrong. As a society we have rightly judged murder to be wrong.I look at people who have committed terrible atrocities and I might truly believe that what they have done deserves that they should forfeit their life. The problem though is that ultimately, we as a society use some individual or individuals to do our dirty work for us. Some one has to perform that execution. Sure, there will be all sorts of people prepared to do it but that isn't the point. We send our young people off to war and they so often come back with their lives shattered because of what they have seen and done. Capital punishment just hardens the heart of the executioner and it hardens the hearts of our whole society.Capital punishment, even if deserved, is wrong for society. It drags us all down.

Absolutely. Well put.

This is simply another example of disregarding Jesus in order to believe in an inerrant Bible.

Essentially I get it from the Bible. If we actually respect what God has to say to us through the Scriptures instead of understanding it as if God essentially dictated it, then we understand a coherent narrative that IMHO makes sense of my life and the world. The ability to reason is a gift from God and I have no doubt that we are intended to use that gift in understanding the scriptures.You cannot with reason square the idea of a loving god with a god that commands public stoning for any reason let alone trivial ones, or that commits and commands genocide with the a god that commands forgiveness, mercy and even love of enemies, but we have been over that. You cannot with reason explain away the contradictions in time and events.Our basic difference lies in how we understand what is written in the 66 books that make up the Bible. With your inerrantist method of understanding Scripture you can come up and declare what you believe are absolute answers to various questions. My view does leave more grey areas. Unlike yourself, I can’t pick a verse out of the Scriptures and claim it as an absolute truth.
What I do claim as fundamentally true are that God is good with all that entails, and that God the Father resurrected Jesus into a renewed eternal bodily existence that is similar but different from what we currently experience. Those are my subjective beliefs with which I base the rest of my Christian understanding on.One of the quotes of CS Lewis that resonates with me is this quote that is on his memorial tablet in Westminster Abbey -“I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen. Not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else”.The three writers that have had the greatest impact on my understanding of Christian theology are all Brits. The three are CS Lewis as a Christian philosopher, NT Wright as a theologian and 1st century historian, and John Polkinghorne as a scientist and theologian. Jesus’ death and resurrection was used as a means for God to start a new Kingdom of God movement. It was not a death so that we could simply have our sins forgiven and go to heaven when we die. If meant that death, the ultimate evil did not have the final answer. It meant that God was renewing the covenant for the world. It was a Kingdom composed of Jesus followers who took on a renewed life which was based on the life of Christ and whose characteristics are based on the love, forgiveness, mercy etc of Jesus. Its adherents are called to embody and reflect that love to the world. We do keep letting Him down don’t we. Jesus prayed to God the Father. At the same time Jesus embodied Yahweh’s return to Israel. As John 1 says, the Word became flesh. I’d add that John didn’t say that the word became a book. God enthroned Jesus as metaphorically described in Daniel 7 where Jesus is given dominion over all nations. I can accept the virgin conception as truth but it wouldn’t bother me if it could be shown to be a metaphor. It is only mentioned in 2 of the Gospels and not at all in the Epistles. It does have a legendary sense about it. In ways that I don’t understand but accept, God through the Holy Spirit endowed Jesus with the perfect understanding of His nature and the strength and wisdom to fulfill His God given mission on Earth. I believe that God the Father brought life into existence and I leave to science to figure out how. I believe that Jesus the Son was born into our world at a particular time and place and that God the Father enthroned Him as Lord and gave Him dominion over the nations. I see the Holy Spirit as the still small voice of God that reaches out to all of us as our conscience. Yes. It was a renewed life form and a resurrection that foreshadows the ultimate resurrection of all of creation. He metaphorically seems to have had one foot in our earthly dimension and one foot in God’s heavenly dimension. I have no problem with the idea that walls wouldn’t contain Him. I have no idea of what the disciples saw, and frankly it doesn’t matter anyway. The point is that Jesus went to be with the Father. Yes, but not in the way that you envision. The scriptures are a lot more ambiguous than you think. Ultimately it is about new creation with a renewed heaven and earth that become one. Christ’s return is part of that. Whether it happens for all of creation at once or whether it happens individually as we shuffle off from our earthly existence I don’t pretend to know. I do know that in the next life I’m going to all the lectures.

Wright is an NT scholar so I'm not sure how he views all of the OT. As far as I can tell Polkinghorne and I are about on the smae page and I think I'm pretty close to Lewis. That is flat out wrong and gives you a greatly distorted view of the God whose Word is embodied by Jesus.I answered the rest of your questions already. You want everything put in nice tidy boxes with bumper sticker labels. Christianity isn't like that. It is a faith of the heart. It isn't a religion of dos and don'ts. God is the great heart changer. and He calls us to use our renewed hearts to fulfill our vocation of reflecting His love into the world.

That is one of the many problems with your interpretation of the Scriptures. You take a 21st century reading of 2-3000 year old Scriptures, translated from between 2 or more other languages and read them like you would a newspaper, or even more strangely like a science text . You simply ignore the obvious fact that all of the scriptures were written within the context of an entirely different time, place, culture and situation and they have to be understood in that context.
You want to boil everything down into cryptic little sentences. Christ's message of love is simple enough but theology, not so much. You then dumb down the theology and in doing so you wind up twisting Jesus' message of love so that it becomes almost unrecognizable. I suggest as evidence I can read back over numerous posts that you have put together here, and I have to say I'm just not feeling the love. Again a simple yes or no does not answer the question. You have to understand the idea of Jesus dying for our sins within the context of a Jewish 1st century world. The Jews kept praying for the return of Yahweh. They believed that one of the precursors of this was that it would mean that Yahweh had finally forgiven them of their sins.The Jews had believed that when Yahweh returned they would be led in defeat of the enemy, (in this case the Romans), and at the least they would cease to be an occupied nation and would control their own destiny. Beyond that they hoped to be the powerful nation in their world, and that they would have control over other nations. However, before that could happen they would have to be forgiven their sins.Jesus comes along as messiah and says essentially that it isn’t the Romans who are the enemy but that it is the evil that is behind them. He says that the weapon against evil is love and spoke against a military revolution. He tells them that a revolution will bring about the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple. It didn’t take supernatural knowledge to predict that. The Romans would do what they always did.In addition Jesus taught that it wasn’t just about a small plot of land in the Middle East but that what He was doing was for the world.
After the resurrection happened the theologians, like Paul, started to sort out what Jesus, life, death and resurrection all meant. They finally understood that Jesus had embodied Yahweh’s return, even though it hadn’t looked like they had expected. If Yahweh had returned then it followed from Jewish doctrine that their sins had been forgiven. Also they went further in saying that as it was for the world, which meant that the sins of the world had been forgiven, including Jesus’ followers.You can draw a yes or a no out of that as you please. I believe that one way or another that Jesus, born a human being, perfectly embodied the “Word” or the nature of God. The “Word became flesh” to quote John. It may have been an immaculate conception but I’m more interested in the result than the means. I accept the idea of the birth to a virgin but I also realize that the accounts of that are not central to the Gospels, not mentioned in the Epistles and do have a legendary feel about them. I really have no idea how to answer. The substantive part of anyone is their mind. Yes, I believe that Jesus was of one mind with the Father. The Bible is clear that there is a separation between Jesus and the Father. Jesus prayed to the Father and never claimed equality with the God He worshiped and followed. I am a Trinitarian as the “Ancient of Days’ in Daniel enthroned the “Son of Man” over His Kingdom of All Nations. The Temple had always been for the Jews the place where on could go to be in God’s place on Earth and be forgiven their sins but Jesus became a Temple replacement and went around forgiving sins. The Holy Spirit is that part of the Trinity that connects us with the Father and the Son.
What do your even mean as the Holy Spirit as a person? The resurrected Jesus returned in bodily form that differed from His previous bodily existence. He appears to have been able to transition between God's heavenly dimension and our Earthly one. I think the Bible actually doesn't have Him going through walls but bypassing them all together. Going into a cloud was simply Jewish language for going into the presence of God which relates back to numerous accounts in the Hebrew Scriptures. I'm kinda of agnostic on that whole thing. I'm inclined to believe that Jesus' return happens to each of us when we shuffle off from this world. That seems to make sense to me as if we are moving to a recreated timeless world that doesn't experience time or change ,as we do now, then I can't see how we can go into that world at a point of time. Frankly, that whole issue is well above my pay grade. The point is to simply live out our lives by fulfilling our vocation which is to reflect God's love into creation. Amen to that. We sing a piece in church some times which includes the line, "so complex so simple, so clear so mysterious". The Christian call to love our neighbour is so clear and so simple, yet understanding the theology behind it is so complex and mysterious. We do best when we focus on the clear and simple part. My trouble is that I find the complex and mysterious part so interesting.