JehovahsWitness wrote:otseng wrote:My main point is arguing it is not necessary to believe the Bible is inerrant.Necessary for what ? To be authorative in what this forum? A person’s life ? For salvation?
In this debate, is inerrancy necessary to believe the Bible is authoritative? We can also ask if the belief in inerrancy is necessary for salvation.
Anyway the point is, that in the absence of knowing what the word means, your question becomes meaningless.
I would agree that there is no consensus on what inerrancy means, even for those that hold to inerrancy. Another reason why the term should be dropped since the term is meaningless.
https://debatingchristianity.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=985757#p985757
JehovahsWitness wrote:
I didnt say there is no consensus, (and the term is obviously not meaningless), I said “…in the absence of knowing what the word means”. There doesn’t have to be a consensus there just has to be a dictionary; most people that can read agree what inerrant means and I know what the word means because I speak English, it means “without error”.
Anybody can make up any definition for any word. But, unless there’s some consensus with a definition, it cannot be applied broadly.
Providing a good definition of inerrancy that is widely accepted is not easy.
One of the major problems is the lack of agreement on precisely what “inerrancy” means.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/ … 23b450f9e/
The doctrine of biblical inerrancy is a bit trickier to define than it seems.
https://answersingenesis.org/is-the-bib … mentalism/
Donald Bloesch puts it, I am not comfortable with the term inerrancy when applied to Scripture because it has been co-opted by a rationalistic, empiricistic mentality that reduces truth to facticity.
https://www.patheos.com/blogs/unsystema … icalism-2/
The main problem I see with defining inerrancy is all the qualifications that needs to be added to it. When it has the need to specify a list of what inerrancy is not (which seems to just keep growing), then it reminds me of the epicycles in Greek cosmology.
https://debatingchristianity.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=985827#p985827