Over the weekend I listened to an interview with Mike Licona
and Richard Burridge on the Unbelivable? Podcast. Burridge is Dean of Kings College London and
Licona clearly identified himself as a Burridge fanboy. At about the 14:30 mark in the Podcast
Burridge makes the outlandish statement that inerrancy is a 19th
century heresy!
Of course, this would have been a shock to Jesus who in Mt.
5:17—18 said that even the smallest letters of the Hebrew scriptures would be
fulfilled. He might have saved Himself
some embarrassment if He had known that the idea that the scriptures were
preserved down to the jot and tittle was actually a heresy.
Of course, Jesus’ detractors would have been happy since in
Mt. 22:32 Jesus was trying to reason with them on the basis of the tense of the
Hebrew verb. Also in Mt. 22:44 Jesus has
hanging His argument on one of those small Hebrew letters that makes the
difference between “Lord” and “My Lord”. It is a wonder that His opponents didn’t
answer by pointing out that He couldn’t rely on those sorts of things to have
been accurately preserved.
Not only that, Paul’s critics would have been happy too. After all, in Gal. 3:16 Paul was making His
point based on the fact that the promises to Abraham were made to Abraham’s
seed in the singular, not to Abraham’s seeds in the plural. If Paul’s critics had only realized that
inerrancy is a 19th century heresy they could have dismissed Paul’s
arguments as naïve if not outright heretical.
Since they were followers of Jesus and readers the Gospels
and Epistles it is also no wonder that Clement of Rome, Justin Martyr,
Athenagoras, Tertullian, Athenasisus of Alexandria and John Chrysostom also
followed Jesus and Paul and got the whole inerrancy thing wrong.
I guess we are all in debt to Burridge in pointing out the
heresy of inerrancy
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