When the church abandons the belief that the New Testament is inerrant, it eventually runs out of anything to talk about.  This slippery slope has no bottom; you fall forever.

I acknowledge lots of problems with the traditional discussions of inerrancy, mostly for the same reason the effort to define _how_ Jesus is present in the Supper quickly becomes absurd.    It is one thing to believe something is true; it is another to explain _how_ it is true.    We believers believe lots of things we can’t draw as an algorithm.   Indeed, the impulse to need to explain how something works is often an inability to believe — or it is a desire to not look like a simpleton.   We have to convince everyone around us that a piece of bread becoming God’s flesh for us makes perfect sense, you see,  because we’re still just as smart as you are, even though we’ve bought this whole thing about a bearded guy in the sky. But an incomplete “how” is not an irrationality. It’s just a finitude. Read the gospels: Jesus hated the “how” questions. He thought it was enough to hear the “what”, and then do it.

Second, there’s the matter of personal histories. Inerrancy has become a repulsive idea for lots of people who grew up conservative churches, because when they were kids they were taught all kinds of silly things, stemming from the confusion between “without error” and “physically true and without metaphor and subject to canons of materiality we only use here and no-where else in language”.    When God says pi is equal to 3 He is not making a goof.   He is talking like you do.   He gets to apply the principle of materiality to His verbal precision just like you do.

Third, it’s become more acceptable to just reject a verse or three because they make you feel bad. Paul says something about women, you’re a woman, his comment doesn’t make you feel about yourself the way you long ago decided you had the right to feel about yourself, so his comment must be wrong in the way that older cultures were wrong about lots of things before we discovered science.

So there are understandable reasons Christians have dropped inerrancy, if we allow that escaping baggage is understandable.

Which wouldn’t be a problem if the text of the NT remained authoritative.   But it seems to be — empirically — just fooling ourselves to think we can let the NT contain errors of some kind and still have an “inspired” revelatory document, over time.   It seems — empirically — to be a predictable slippery slope, this one, that all the debaters always slide down to a NT that is an embarrassing cultural document containing a canonical core, which core just happens to be harmonious with what we in our denomination want God to be like.   You think Paul was wrong about women; others think he was wrong about gays.  Still others think he was wrong about blood atonement.  None of you have an authoritative text.   You just differ in what you find charming.

I’m not saying that this slippery slope into silence is true for every individual.   In fact, what makes slippery slopes so dangerous is that the slope is long and the incline slight.   This process is multi-generational.   You allow that Paul just might have been a child of his culture when he talked about women; your children, or their children, will not be able to grasp why redemption is exempt from that critique.    The line you think you are drawing based on some obvious principle is just an accident of your own psychological history.

The counter argument to this is usually to point out an example of some person or group who has successfully paused on a single shelf on the slippery slope. This misses the point entirely. The problem with slippery slopes is not that they have footholds half way down; the problem is that, observationally, the footholds don’t hold. My observation is that they hold less than one life time, and often less than one political cycle. The slope is long, slow, but steady. The stops are, relatively, a breath or two.

Some Christians respond to this inerrancy talk by demanding that we explain to them exactly how some text or other is without error, or true, or what do we  “do with it”.    Again, this is irrelevant to the first question, the question of belief. I believe that what Paul says about women is true about women and men — whatever he is saying, before I can grasp what he is saying.   Anything else, and there is no revelation, there is just what we agree with, or can use. Faith seeks understanding. But the critics are really just saying they cannot have faith until all problems of understanding are solved first. We are tempted to have sympathy for that mindset. But, notice, Jesus had sympathy for lots of people, but He had no sympathy or patience with those who insisted all their logical knots get untied before they believe. He had no kind words for those folks. He treated it like a moral failing.

“But, but, belief in Jesus is not the same thing as belief in a specific doctrine, like inerrancy.” True enough, but there’s a demand on the mind from noticing what happens over time to X when Y is adopted. Correlation is not necessarily causation, but causation is inferred by first noticing the correlations.

Over time, the church simply stops talking about what the NT **says.** What survives, for awhile, is what the NT **means to that denomination’s tradition** (with local color).  But since that meaning has no anchor it soon becomes the church defending the gospel because it is **useful**.   You can see this on a thousand evangelical blogs, now, where this or that version of the gospel is defended because it is the only message the writer finds _psychologically tolerable_.  You can declare James an epistle of straw because it is not useful to you personally.  Your grandchildren will not find sanctification useful.   Their grandchildren will not find Romans or Galatians useful.

The gospel is useful, of course, but that is not all it is; it also happens to be true and the only source document, the body of writings we’ve labeled “the new testament” is either what God wants us to hear, whether we perceive it to be useful on any given day or not, or there is no source document available. I’m sorry, it should be clear enough by now that there is no “getting behind” these documents. Take them or leave them.

There have been lots of arguments in the church’s history about this or that text — lots of blood shed, actually — and these preoccupations and atrocities  have not been something to be proud of.   But they happened because those people knew how much it mattered what the NT says.   The ancient theological battles have not ceased because we solved them, nor because we got enlightened.   They are ceasing because the text, as sacred and authoritative text, is gone.

At any rate, what I am saying is verifiable, over time.   I’m saying that the groups who have found inerrancy not useful are, or will, notice their conversations with their Christian friends becoming more about baseball and beer.

Jesus vanishes from a human document.