The words of the LORD are pure words: as silver tried in a furnace of earth, purified seven times. Thou shalt keep them, O LORD, thou shalt preserve them from this generation for ever. Psalm 12:6,7
Most Evangelicals believe the Bible is the inspired, inerrant, and infallible Word of God. Every word is true, without error or contradiction. This position cannot be rationally sustained. Educated Evangelicals know about translation errors and contradictions, yet still maintain the Bible is somehow, some way, without error. How do Evangelicals, knowing that the evidence is stacked against them, continue to say that the Bible — be it at the manuscript or translation level — is inerrant?
Evangelicals invented out of whole cloth a new doctrine to cover their asses — the preservation of Scripture. The preservation of scripture doctrine asserts that God has preserved the Bible throughout human history so that the Bibles we have today are God’s very words; God superintended this process in such a way that error did not enter the text through the translation and copying process.
I spent fifty years in Evangelical Christianity. I heard countless preachers preach-up and defend the preservation of Scripture. What these preachers said sounded right, but none provided evidence for their claim. Instead, we were told that God is perfect — how could his Word be otherwise? If this doctrine is true, then Evangelical preachers should be able to produce evidence for this untainted line of Scripture — all sixty-six books. When asked for this evidence — crickets. And yes, I am aware some proponents of King James-onlyism have detailed charts they use to prove the preservation of Scripture (and to a lesser degree the purity of the Baptist church).
Remember, the goal is to protect the Bible from critical examination. Doubt is poison to Evangelical preachers, so they go to great lengths to inoculate congregants from anything that would cause them to question the inerrancy and infallibility of the Bible. One way to do that is to tell church members that God has preserved his very words, and they can trust that the Bible is authoritative, accurate, and true. Of course, any rudimentary understanding of the history of the Biblical text and the underlying Greek and Hebrew manuscripts shows that inerrancy, infallibility, and preservation cannot be rationally sustained. Inspiration is a faith claim beyond rational inquiry, but inerrancy, infallibility, and preservation can be critically examined. And when they are, the presuppositions underlying them fail.
Bruce Gerencser, 67, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 46 years. He and his wife have six grown children and thirteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.
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The written word is a human invention. It’s fantastic and it underlies everything we do, but it’s not perfect. Look at any field of human endeavour, from car maintenance to heart surgery, and there are countless millions of books and articles on every subject. Yet nothing works as well as actual hands on. Kids work on car engines without ever referring to a book, until they get stuck. Imagine performing brain surgery with just a book of instructions! And even the books and articles are developing and progressing all of the time. If they don’t they’re soon of little use. I’m going to assert that if there were a god it would not have communicated by the written word. If it did, then why not give an update, perhaps using AI? Why not ensure that languages translate freely between each other? Even in English there are words, phrases, verb conjugations, and so on that we can’t agree on. There’s little about the bible on which we can be absolutely certain, but that it isn’t the word of god is one of them.