Regarding the question of idolatry, God is infinite and His Word (capital W) aka Jesus Christ is infinite. The Bible is a finite set of words. They are the words God has given us to measure and evaluate all other words so they are uniquely holy but if we’re using them appropriately, then they have infinite interpretive depth. If you think there’s only one possible meaning for every verse in the Bible, then you’re treating it as an idol.

My worry with inerrancy is that it leads to a static reductionist interpretation. God wants to speak a new word to you every time you open the Bible. If you’ve already decided you know what something means, then God can’t use it to tell you something that confronts your sin or speaks a new hope to you or whatever He wants to say in any particular moment in time.

Thanks for stopping by the blog and for taking the time to respond to my post. It’s not clear to me, however, that you’ve said much that calls into question the above argument for inerrancy. Because neither the Garden of Eden nor the Tower of Babel concerns you raise calls into question God’s inability to error (my premise [1] above) or the Bible’s being the Word of God (my premise [2]), they don’t do anything to question the soundness of the argument. Because the argument is valid, the only way we can avoid the truth of the conclusion is if one of the premises is false, but these passages don’t suggest that. (Here’s another way of putting this point: you attempted to cite passages that would suggest the argument’s conclusion is false. But because the argument is logically valid, the only way you can logically avoid the conclusion is by showing (a) that one of the premises is false or (b) that the conclusion doesn’t follow from those premises. Your passages do neither (a) nor (b).)

So, while it is important to get into the various hermeneutics of difficult passages (like the ones you cite—though your concern regarding God’s sovereignty and the Tower of Babel seems really misguided), in the context of discussing this argument for inerrancy it’s actually a red herring. In other contexts (say, discussions of original sin or sovereignty) such interpretive issues will be extremely important, they’re just not for this one.

Now, your initial point regarding idolatry would be the route to take if you want to reject the conclusion of the argument. The idea would be that [2] above somehow commits one to idolatry. If so, then that’d be a good reason to think [2] is false (and of course, though the argument would still be valid it’d no longer be sound and so the argument wouldn’t give us any reason to accept the conclusion). However, I don’t see any reason at all to think that idolatry must follow from [2] (for more on this, see the comment above by my colleague Rich).

So is this your first argument? (1) If you think the original manuscripts of the bible were without error, then you will worship your NIV study bible (i.e., the translated copy in your hand). However, (2) worship belongs to God alone. Hence (3) you should think the original biblical manuscripts contained errors.

I’m very happy to accept (2). I think you’re going to have a hard time proving (1) though. Perhaps if I stumbled upon the original (error free) manuscripts, I’d succumb to the temptation to put them under glass, talk in hushed tones in their presence, and generally treat them like the Ark. As it is, however, I highlight my NIV and write in the margins. I’d *never* do that with the originals!

I think the idolatry charge is probably just *ad hominem* in this connection.

I. Garden of Eden

“Then the Lord God said, “See, the man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil; and now, he might reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life, and eat, and live forever”—” Genesis 3:22

According to the plain meaning of the text, the reason God kicked Adam and Eve out of the Garden of Eden was because he was threatened by their immortality not as a punishment for their sin. What Genesis 3:22 suggests is that the serpent was telling the truth to Adam and Eve; it even echoes the exact wording that the serpent uses. If you’re going to let this verse be inerrant, then you have to completely torpedo everything we have developed about our doctrine of original sin, including the claim that Adam and Eve were immortal before they disobeyed God because if they were, they wouldn’t need to eat from the tree of life to live forever.

II. Tower of Babel

“And the Lord said, “Look, they are one people, and they have all one language; and this is only the beginning of what they will do; nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them. 7 Come, let us go down, and confuse their language there, so that they will not understand one another’s speech.”
Genesis 11:6-7

The second passage is particularly troubling because there is no way that you can make the text into a moralistic argument for confounding the peoples’ languages who have built the tower of Babel. Nothing in the text says that what they were doing was morally wrong. We have to superimpose that dishonestly on top of the text.

God is clearly worried that “nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them.” That is the plainly stated motive of his action. So if this passage is inerrant, then God is not omnipotent and self-sufficiently sovereign. You have to choose between divine sovereignty and inerrancy. Checkmate.