u/WestphaliaReformer

My family and I have lived in Aina Haina for the last few years, but due to our landlord's declining health we need to move out. A friend is offering us a great deal on a 17th story condo near downtown - my wife and I like urban living but haven't done it with kids (we have a 3 and 1 year old). I was wondering if anyone here has done it and has any insight or can share their experience about the good and the bad. Thanks!

If you want, you can just share your thoughts on the question in the title. Context and my line of thought leading me to ask this question is below. Sorry, it's a tad long.

For the last 6 months or so, I have been enjoying good conversations about the doctrine of inerrancy with friends lately, and one place we seem to have a disagreement concerning the doctrine of inerrancy is if it ought to be an immediate product of the doctrine of inspiration or a descriptor of Scripture after interpretation. To try to keep it short, here's been the my line of thought:

A) The doctrine of inspiration must be affirmed or denied prior to the study of Scripture. I come to this conclusion because there is no outside standard of what characterizes a divinely-inspired text which we can compare the Bible to. Of course, we may be able to find evidence in the Bible which appears to confirm divine inspiration, but without objective methodological controls outside of what we think a divinely-inspired text might look like, I don't think we can affirm or deny inspiration with total certainty based on our study of the Bible - it must be presupposed. My friends and I agree on this point.

B) Where we disagree is if inerrancy ought to be an immediate product of divine inspiration - my friends believe it is warranted, but I do not. My question is - why would inerrancy immediately follow inspiration? I had a friend answer "because the Bible's description of God is such that he would not lie/speak falsely," but that comes from study of the Bible and thus is not an argument for the immediate connection between inspiration and inerrancy. It seems to me best to say that Scripture is inspired and presuppose nothing else about what would characterize a text that is divinely inspired (since, as stated in A, we have no standard of what characterizes an inspired text outside of the Bible itself, and thus only the study of the Bible informs what characterizes an inspired text). Since the Bible makes many claims (historical, natural scientific, etc.) that intersect with other disciplines (which themselves are certainly liable to error), it seems evident that inerrancy can only be affirmed or denied with careful cross-examination.

C) The significance behind this distinction, to me, is whether or not inerrancy ought to be a base principle which guides interpretation (which it would if the Bible is assumed inerrant before studying it) or if inerrancy ought to be a descriptor of the Bible only applied after it has been studied and determined inerrant. If inerrancy is assumed beforehand, it seems like it could lead to an unstable hermeneutic, where standard interpretive principles are abandoned when it comes to perceived problem texts (they appear contradictory to another statement in Scripture, or seem to contradict historical/scientific studies), and the new hermeneutic basically becomes 'whatever interpretation will safeguard inerrancy, no matter how unlikely it is to actually mean that'.

D) It seems like assuming inerrancy beforehand is unnecessary because, if the Bible is actually inerrant, it would be the natural conclusion of Biblical study anyways. If we don't assume inerrancy beforehand, that frees interpretation to maintain its principles (which is another can of worms) without having to defend an a priori assumption. And if the Bible does appear after diligent study to contain errors, then we can conclude that, whatever characterizes divine inspiration, apparently the allowance of errors (to some degree) is part of it. I want to be clear - I am not saying that the Bible is errant, misleading, or false in part or in whole, I'm just trying to follow the logic of my argument. It seems that this approach allows the Bible to be the Bible, without conforming it to our assumptions about how its suppose to behave.

In short, it seems to me that divine inspiration is an article of faith (that is, cannot be proved or falsified by empirical study), while the doctrine of inerrancy is not (since it can be proved or falsified by empirical study). Of course, inerrancy is also made difficult by the fact that many interpreters define it in different (and at times contradictory) ways. I would love to hear some feedback, especially critiquing my line of thought, and if anyone has a book recommendation, that would be great.

The verse begins with והקריב את קרבנו - Most translations (including LXX and Vulgate) obscure the shared root, although the KJV translates it as "and he shall offer his offering." I was just curious about how cognate accusatives are categorized and if constructions are only considered cognate accusatives if its understood that the object is used redundantly or specifically because of its shared root with the preceding verb.