Scripture as Timeless Truth

This post is a supplement for my sermon on January 27th, Timeless Truth vs. Changing Times. You should be able to access the sermon here. If you were there you heard me say that the passage from 2 Timothy  used so often to prove the inerrancy of Scripture (Every scripture is inspired by God [or God-breathed] and is useful for teaching, for showing mistakes, for correcting, and for training character, so that the person who belongs to God can be equipped to do everything that is good.[CEB]) is actually misused to make that point. Here's some of the reasons why:

1. When 2 Timothy references "scripture" it isn't talking about what you and I know as scripture. The Bible as we know it wasn't canonized (made "official" scripture) until the 4th century. Between the time of Jesus and then a strong consensus emerged about what writings should be considered sacred, but they would not have been called scripture. Instead, for the author of 2 Timothy scripture referred to what we call the Old Testament (more or less - that's a whole other story). So at most we're now talking about only the Old Testament being infallible.

2. We have only translations from copies of original manuscripts. Most people today who say all of scripture is inerrant will say that it is infallible in the original manuscripts. This shows an understanding that there is always something lost in translation (i.e. from Greek to English or Hebrew to English) and that even the documents we have in the original language read differently. A good example is the Gospel of Mark, where some manuscripts have a short ending, some have a long ending, and others have both the short and long ending. Which one is the God inspired one? The original one - whichever that one was. The problem is we don't know which one that was. It doesn't help us to know that the original manuscript was inerrant if we don't know exactly what the original manuscript was.

3. 2 Timothy doesn't actually say that even the Old Testament is inerrant. To say "inspired by God" or "God-breathed" is close to the same thing as inerrant, but not quite. More importantly, note what the next part of the passage says. Scripture is "useful for teaching, for showing mistakes, for correcting, and for training character..." It is inspired by God for these purposes. It is not inspired by God for teaching biology, astronomy, or history. Those topics that sometimes we want the Bible to be most authoritative about are topics that 2 Timothy says are not what it is really about.

With all that said, I truly believe in the Bible. If you heard the message on the 27th I hope that was clear. We just need to be honest about what it means to say we believe in the Bible.