Yesterday on the Journey I opened up this topic of whether we would say that the Scriptures are infallible or inerrant. I talk about this a bit in the book, Reading Scripture Like the Early Church, but I didn't want to get too deep into it, even in the book because it eventually will boil down to a person's definitions of these two English words, and of course you know the Bible was not written in English. In any case, we talked about it some yesterday, and no doubt it will come up again as we continue on the Journey.

For the moment I want to point out something I meant to point out yesterday but I think I somehow skipped over it. When we were talking about the Greek word for "surprised" or "amazed" and I said that it has a range of meaning that can encompass the whole gamut from mildly surprised ("hmmm... didn't see that coming" ) to wildly amazed ("holy crap what is going on here?!" ) - so the Greek word itself doesn't really help us solve the question of whether Zechariah was deaf.

Here's what I should have pointed out - for those who hold to a doctrine of inerrancy, they will often miss the forest of meaning by obsessing over the trees of the Greek words. They will often make the mistake that if they can nail down the ONE meaning of that Greek word elsewhere, then it must mean that here in this place, too. They assume that - quite apart from context - the same Greek word has to mean the same single English word every place it comes up. That may be overstating it, but it is a tendency for those who believe in inerrancy.

I would love to hear from you all what your thoughts are on this topic...

To start, I think we should begin with the assumption that we should all think of the Scriptures as infallible - inspired by God, authoritative, and trustworthy. So we should begin with that common ground. Now what do you think?