Ehrman and Inerrancy

Bart Ehrman, Professor of New Testament at the University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill, has been buzzing about the blogosphere as of late. I refer specifically to the following posts on blogs I frequently visit:

Maggi Dawn - When God Vanishes (II)
Scott Adams (the author of 'Dilbert') - Uh-Oh
AKMA - That's "A. K. M. Adam," Not "Scott Adams"

See also this Washington Post article which gives Ehrman's biographical background.

(The current post is also an indirect response to my good buddy Dan's reflections on the Bible.)

I find a lot of similarity between myself and Professor Ehrman. Like him, I also had a 'born-again' experience and joined the evangelical Church. Like him, I was indoctrinated in a fundamentalist style Church. And like him, I came up against major challenges when I began to academically study Christianity.

However, unlike Ehrman, I have yet to completely abandon Christian faith - at least not yet. Granted, it took him quite some time to come to realize he was a full blown agnostic. But still, I don't think I'll ever completely reject Christianity. I have come to realize that there are other ways of being Christian than I had once thought. Reading the blogs of others who have also gone through these struggles and yet held onto a Christian faith--however radically reconstructed--has shown me that there isn't just "fundamentalist evangelical" and "agnostic".

I like how Maggi Dawn puts it:

I was once a "born again" believer, and it was in part the recognition of endless intellectual dishonesty, both in biblical interpretation and in church practice, that led me to re-conceive my own faith. For me, though, the end result (so far at any rate) has not been the loss of faith, but a radical reconstruction of it. If, like Ehrman, my faith had depended on the inerrancy of the "original texts" of the Bible, I guess I would have lost my faith too.

Regulars to my blog will by now know that I do not believe in the inerrancy of the Bible (see Biblical Inerrancy). Yet I once was an inerrantist. In my first year of university, I tried desperately to hold on to the doctrine of inerrancy. I read all sorts of attempts to justify and support biblical inerrancy. But my scientific mind squashed those attempts. Saying that the Bible is a human text--written by regular human beings--makes much greater sense of the data (in this case, the Bible itself) than saying that it is a Divine text, revealed to the various authors by God. And so by the time second year began, I had let go of biblical inerrancy.

But I am still here. While Ehrman decided to call it quits, I decided to stick with it and see what I could do. I rebuilt my castle (see Building Castles - Part I and Part II).

I fear for those around me who hold to biblical inerrancy. I fear that someday their bubble might collapse - that reality might catch up to them. And I fear that, like Ehrman, they will give up on their faith. False dichotomies abound: it's either all completely true, or it's all completely false (see the related Slippery Slope). That's how a lot of people think, I'm afraid.

Cheers.