Music to my ears

"It is my argument in this book that the Jewish spirit did not set out to develop a scripture; that during most of the biblical period a written scripture played no significant role; that the rabbis made prodigious efforts to mitigate the limiatations imposed by the existence of scripture; that the concept of an oral memorized law in part reflects these efforts; and that until the European centuries, Judaism more or less effectively escaped the limitations of scripture.

Judaism is not and never has been just the teachings of a set of authorized books. The text is not our homeland; life is. Commentary reads in as readily as it reads out. Our books were meant to become part of us, the living voice of God and tradition. Except under rare circumstances in Jewish history, the texts did not define life. Far more than has generally been recognized, life defined the texts." (D. J. Silver, The Story of Scripture: From Oral Tradition to the Written Word, 286.)

Or as I wrote in my book: "the Bible was made for man and not man for the Bible." (80)

Help my unbelief

"[B]y adopting the inerrancy postulate, by arguing that the Bible is competely void of problematic passages, by insisting that others agree with them, inerrantists have trapped non-inerrantists into a corner not of their choosing...Many inerrantists, I've observed, have bully mentalities which compel them to impose their views on others. Thus non-inerrantists have no choice but to respond to inerrantists' aggressive tactics. Our behavior is motivated by a desire to deliver fellow believers from the ideological cul-de-sac down which inerrantists want everyone to travel. That's precisely what inerrantism is-- a hermeneutical dead end street which leads to intellectual dishonesty and to an ignoring of the phenomena of the text."

Clayton Sullivan, Toward a Mature Faith: Does Biblical Inerrancy Make Sense? (Decatur, GA: SBC Today, 1990), 56.

Trapped in a corner at Westminster Theological Seminary, I, too, felt the contradictory impulses of owning up to what the Bible really is and believing what inerrantists insist the Bible must be. At the time, the song "Blurry" helped me articulate the cognitive dissonance I was experiencing: the same community that instilled in me that "real" Christianity cannot survive without inerrancy also convinced me that if you take an honest look at it, inerrancy is false. What is one to do?

"Can you take it all away
Can you take it all away
When you shoved it in my face
Explain again to me

Nobody told me what to find
Nobody told me what to say
Noone showed you where to turn
Told you where to run away
Nobody told you where to hide
Nobody told you what to say
Noone showed you where to turn
Showed you where to run away

Can you take it all away..."

-Puddle of Mudd

We need a realistic view of scripture

"Even for those with sufficient skills in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek , the problem remains that we still do not have an established authoritative text that all Christian biblical scholars have adopted. Likewise, we do not yet have one universally accepted set of books that all Christians acknowledge as divinely inspired, and there is no single text or translation of the Bible that garners the full support of the Christian community. The history of the Bible's development teaches us that it is very difficult to establish hard and fast rules that apply in every situation. That was true in antiquity and is still true today. In the midst of some of the uncertainty that we have shown, wherein lies authority for the church? Jesus himself said that all authority has been given to him (Matt. 28:18), and he did not speak of transferring this authority to a particular collection, text, or translation of books to rival his authority in the church...

...perhaps scholars and church leaders should consider statements of faith that are more reflective of the actual state of canonical inquiry, textual investigation, and translation practice."

-Lee Martin McDonald, "Wherein Lies Authority? A Discussion of Books, Texts, and Translations," in Exploring the Origins of the Bible: Canon Formation in Historical, Literary, and Theological Perspective, ed. C. A. Evans and E. Tov (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2008), 238-239.