Persons raised Christian: Did/does your church teach Biblical inerrancy, and if so...

In My Humble Opinion
21

I was raised in the Church of Christ, which believes in Biblical inerrancy.
I had doubts about the “infallibility of Scripture” for as long as I can remember.
No one ever explicitly told me I was going to Hell for questioning, but I could sense that it made people uncomfortable.

The evidence for evolution was the breaking point for me. I read quite a number of books on Paleontology, Anthropology, etc. My mother encouraged me on this, though she continued to be a faithful Christian. Heck, on most moral matters, I continued to be “Christian”, as far as “what not to do” was concerned – drink, curse, use drugs, avoid premarital sex, etc. My odd fetishes certainly helped with the sex part…

I still attend church services almost every Sunday, even though I don’t believe.
The people are pretty nice, even if I think that they are misguided on most matters. Those sermons about “There is no evidence for Evolution” do make me chuckle a bit, though…

22

I remember that being brought up, the answer they gave to me was not satisfactory, so I don’t really recall what they said, but my take is there has to be more here then they know. it was sort of nod go along with their explanation, but I knew that what they were saying just didn’t add up.

Later I found that the scriptures don’t contradict but expand your mind to be able to see extradimentionally - where those contradictions go away. the apparent contradictions are there for that very reason, to teach us to see more and think deeper. I would WAG it is also like how some areas of physics use a multidimentional universe, and infer that these extra dimensions are real to solve problems that appear unsolvable in our 3D+t universe.

23

(Bold added)

Isn’t the same thing (sort of) accomplished much more efficiently with Zen koans?

24

An inerrant Bible and evolution are not necessarilly contradictory, see the Framework Theory for example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Framework_interpretation_%28Genesis%29

25

This is quite true, and gets truer as you get into older parts of the Bible. I’ve heard it commented that there are more possible versions of the Gospels, based on differing manuscripts, than there are words in the Gospels. Our oldest, most original, least re-copied pieces of the Gospels are from the early 2nd century (and that’s if you count the four-word papyrus fragments; complete copies are 3rd century and later). It’s probably fair to say that the oldest extant copies of the Gospels are at least twelve recopyings removed from the originals, if indeed those Gospels ever had a single original redaction.* Other passages, like 1 Corinthians 11:3-16, are often figured to be marginal additions from scribes that were dutifully incorporated into the text. That passage in particular is often accused of non-Pauline origin because it’s such an awkward transition from what Paul had been talking about and uses vocabulary and style that’s extremely unusual for Paul. 1 Corinthians 14:34-36 is similar; note how sharply it breaks from what Paul had been talking about and how awkward it jumps right back in afterwards. Indeed, we have an old manuscript where a scribe has added a marginal notation, and another scribe, presumably his superior, has added (in paraphrase, I can’t find my text right now), “Lucius, copy the script as it appears, without your own comments!”
*Luke almost certainly is the work of one author working from several sources. The rest probably had a single author, at least in the ancient sense of authorship, where few lines are drawn between research and plagiarism.

Yeah, King James supremacy is a goofy, goofy thing.

26

Wikipedia says they do teach it, but the link is dead. IIRC according to the one LCMS person I know, they do.
Catholic: hell no. And of course Protestants reject parts of the Bible that Catholics keep (and Orthodox is similar in having more, but not identical). They’re missing out on the cooler ones, like Judith, because King James didn’t write it or something.

God gave him the true Bible, and also let him call himself “Jacob” for some reason.

27

My father was a lapsed Catholic, and didn’t go to any church, except for things like weddings, christenings, and funerals. My mother was a member of Unity Christ Church, which used to be a fairly liberal Protestant sect, but has now become full of woo. My mother dragged us kids to Sunday school/church just about every week. Unity didn’t believe in inerrancy.

Many of my friends, though, were Southern Baptists, and sometimes I’d go to church with them, and attend their Vacation Bible Schools. These folks DID believe in biblical inerrancy, and in fact they’d usually believe that the binding on the Bible was genuine leather, as the old joke goes. I brought up some contradictions in the various Baptist churches, and was pretty much told to just shut up and accept it on faith.

My mother used to tell me that when I was a preschooler, I quit believing in Santa Claus because even at that age, I could tell that the Santa in one department store was different from the Santa at another store, and BOTH of them couldn’t be Santa, so…

28

Raised Presbyterian, no inerrancy.

For awhile, I’ve been thinking of writing the president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary with the simple question: what is Biblical inerrancy?

You’d think this would be a straightforward question, but here’s how the letter would continue:

“How, in practice, do I distinguish the verses where it’s appropriate to thunder, “THIS IS THE WORD OF THE LORD!!” from those verses where I point out to any Southern Baptist pastor that few if any Southern Baptists attempt to follow such-and-such verse, and inevitably get told that the verse means something other than its plain and straightforward meaning? How do I know which OT verses have been superseded by the New Covenant, and which ones haven’t? When the plain meanings of different verses of the Bible are in apparent contradiction, what rules exist for resolving those contradictions? And do these rules themselves spring from a Biblical source, or are they the creation of men? And if those rules are the creation of men, aren’t men defining what parts of the Bible are truly inerrant and which aren’t, under the guise of ‘inerrancy’?”

29

Oh, yeah, Biblical inerrancy. Figuring out that was a crock was a big deal to me.

Well, I did have the idea from a pretty young age that it was possible to pull pretty much any conclusion you wanted from the scriptures, by selective quoting and interpretation.

As a teenager, I noticed some things that seemed like contradictions, but really what was being contradicted were the expansive interpretations I was inferring. (To wit: “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and the wages of sin is death. But Elijah didn’t die! Contradiction!” This quite justly failed to convince anyone.)

But I love that in one of Paul’s epistles, he comes out and says that he doesn’t have a word from God on a given subject, so he’s just offering his own judgment. If people would actually read the Bible, instead of using it as a talisman and oracle, they’d see that it’s numerous different pieces written by different persons, and not in fact written by God.

Oh, did you notice that when Luke writes about Paul’s vision on the road to Damascus, and when he writes about Paul recounting his vision on the the road to Damascus, details of what the others in Paul’s party saw/heard change? In the same book? It’s hilarious. It’s arguable that Paul misspoke, the misspeaking was quoted accurately by Luke, and then the earlier chapter is the corrected version–but it’s never lampshaded. Paul seems to have been a bit fuzzy on what other people saw of his vision.

And then there’s the whole big deal about Joseph’s genealogy, to the point that we have two (probably both made up) genealogies for him, and yet Jesus is supposed to be born of a virgin, and later Christians (though thankfully not the NT itself) treated Joseph as a despised stepfather.

Yeah, the contradictions between text and later tradition are a lot of fun, too.

30

If you desperately want this to be true I suppose you could believe it.

31

Yeah, even the other fundies laugh at those guys.

I did Bible Bowl (an odd sort of youth Quiz Bowl league in our sect, with a given book of the Bible to be memorized in a given year), and I remember that when they were still using the Authorized Version/KJV, it had at that point developed so many variant editions that Bible Bowl judges had to allow for variations in answers to some questions. Incredibly mild stuff of course, I don’t remember what; respellings and maybe some added prepositions, maybe? Then they went to Zondervan’s New International Version (NIV), and we had a specific edition, and we had to get the words exactly right. Not sure that was an improvement…

32

I was also raised Catholic, and am old enough to have had BOTH the last of the old-school nuns that Christopher Durnag ripped in Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All For You AND the young, hippie-dippie nuns (who tended to quit after a few years).

Funny thing is, NEITHER side spoke much about the Bible. The old-school nuns obsesed over the TRAPPINGS and the MINOR traditions of Catholicisms, but rarely talked about (or even seemed to care about) Scripture or actual Church dogma. Hence, it never surprises me that so many Catholics my age or younger seem to have no idea what the Church actually teaches!

Once I got to high school, we spent a lot morew time reading Scxriture, and very little was taken literally by my teachers. I believe in a lot more of the Bible than the Jesuits I studied with seemed to

33

Catholic upbringing (secondary school at a private school in England run by Irish priests). I was taught that the Gospels were written way after the time of Jesus and as such a lot of information was passed by word of mouth, meaning errors crept in. I was also taught that Gospels were written during different time periods, allowing for differences.

34

I was raised Espiscopal and to believe in Biblical inerrancy. As a child, I just never really questioned it. Whenever I did see anything that seemed a little off the explanation was generally something like “it’s lost in translation” or “God works in mysterious ways”. I believed that into young adulthood when I wasn’t so much questioning why the Bible is self-contradictory in places or why some things are contradictory with science but why some of the traditions I was taught weren’t consistent with scripture.

It was then that I realized that it didn’t have to be inerrant to still be true and it was the insistence on inerrancy that created a lot of those contradictions in practice that I saw, and then that easily fixed most of the problems I saw with the contradictions between various accounts or with science.

Really, I think a major reason why it doesn’t come up as more of an issue is that I really wasn’t taught much directly from scripture, but rather a lot of what we were taught was from tradition. As in, this is what we interpretted this story to mean, or this is what we believe, and then reading verses that support and reinforce those ideas. There wasn’t a whole lot of just reading parts and then discussing and interpretting them which might have led to those sorts of questions.

35

I was raised Roman Catholic and attended RC schools through high school. Inerrancy as currently espoused by most fundamentalist churches now was definitely not taught in the schools I attended. Science classes in grade school and high school included evolution and no creationism. In religion class I was taught that the flood was a fact, and in science and geography I was taught the current science on geology, plate tectonics, etc. Issues with the nature of the bible versus reality were generally resolved in favor of reality. The bible was treated as the most important religious text, but I never met a nun or a priest who thought that the earth was 6K years old, or anything like that. I finished high school in 1972.

I spent my 20s and 30s as a non-believer. When I came to believe again, I attended a big non-denominational church in Maryland. It was not apparent from the preaching there what the church’s stance on inerrancy was, but the folks who I met with on a weekly basis (a group of about 20 people) seemed to lean toward inerrancy, but not to the extent of young earth creationism.

Here in small town Ohio, inerrancy seems to be the default choice, and YEC is pretty common. I don’t argue with these folks. The bible is important to me, but inerrancy is not.

36

Really? I am Episcopalian now and that doesn’t sound like any Episcopal church I have ever attended. It is among the more liberal of the denominations and I have never heard anyone push biblical inerrancy in the Episcopal church. Quite the opposite as a matter of fact.

37

I’m surprised that Episcopal church would teach inerrancy, but I believe it. There is a very broad range of approaches to scripture in the church, so I could see a conservative evangelical Episcopal church teaching it. Not many of those left in TEC anymore however.

38

As I recall, a number of them left. (I remember news reports of some legal battles over whether the local congregation or the denomination owned the church property.) So they would have still been in the Episcopal Church when most of our posters were young.

39

An interesting thing about the Roman Catholic church is that the Bible was, for centuries, not much taught at all, errant or inerrant. Dogma, tradition, rituals, prayers, but not the actual Word. The Reformation was fueled in part by the invention of printing, which enabled the masses to at least aspire to literacy. But the Catholics held on to the Interpretation Via Priests thing until Vatican II, really. I know a lot of devout older Catholics who grew up with very little knowledge of the Bible at all.

This has now changed, but the RCC is still less scripture-oriented than most other Christian denominations.

40

Lutheran here and we we encouraged to ask about errors in the Bible and we got explanations as to what they were.

In one of my classes our teacher (a pastor) began every class with “who has questions about Christianity” because he said it was healthy to question your faith and find the answers to your questions.