"Bill Keller’s Idiotic Questions"

The Captain's Journal » Bill Keller’s Idiotic Questions: Herschel Smith nails the ignorance behind Bill Keller's questioning of Michele Bachmann. The question in question:

You have said that watching the film series “How Should We Then Live?” by the evangelist Francis Schaeffer was a life-altering event for you. That series stresses the "inerrancy" ­— the literal truth — of the Bible. Do you believe the Bible consists of literal truths, or that it is to be taken more metaphorically?

Herschel goes on to disassemble the simplistic presumptions behind Keller's question, observing, among other things, "Any thinking Christian has to answer Keller’s question, yes and yes. It is both-and, not either-or."

Quite. But Keller doesn't know what he's talking about in another way,too. Keller thinks biblical inerrancy means "the literal truth." That is, to believe that the Bible is inerrant means that its texts must be read at face value only. And of course, fundamentalists do stress that.

But inerrancy does not have to mean only that. I believe the Bible is inerrant but I do not believe that literalism is a faithful reading of the Scriptures in every case or verse. In fact, literalism is not even possible in countless cases because of translation nuances. In many cases we cannot know what the verse "literally" says, and in countless others the cultural contexts are so lost that we can only guess what they might mean.

Even so, one can hold the Scriptures to be inerrant in the way that John Wesley did, but focusing on what he called the great chains of interconnected spiritual truths throughout the Bible.

Another point, that Herschel touches on as well: the form of the literature of the passages concerned is crucial to interpreting them. Historical passages should be taken at face value, For example, the story of young David slaying Goliath is a straightforward, historical account and there is no reason to doubt that it happened pretty much the way it is presented. But consider Jesus's parables throughout the Gospels, for example the parable of the prodigal son in Luke 15. Is the parable literally true? Or did Jesus tell a stylized story to drive home a religious teaching? The story is parabolically true without regard to its "actually happened" truth. We do not have to take the Bible literally to take it seriously.

Tell ya what, Mr. Keller: I assert the inerrancy of the Bible a lot more confidently than you can assert the inerrancy of the New York Times.