Posted by: Nick Norelli | February 1, 2008

“Limited Inerrancy”: Demonic Heresy

The other day Robert Jimenez posted a link to a site that makes some very good material available at a nominal cost.  Like he said, we’re not talking about Matthew Henry’s Commentary or stuff like that (although that is available on the site), we’re talking about Blass, Debrunner, and Funk’s A Greek Grammar of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature; Daniel Wallace’s Greek Grammar Beyond the Basics; BAGD; Pratico & Van Pelt’s Basics of Biblical Hebrew; and so much more.

So you can imagine my shock when I come to the section of resources on Sola Scriptura.  At the top of the page we read:

The Doctrine of  The Scriptures, (The Holy Bible) is the most important in the Christian Church, since all that believe is meant to be based on its Authority. As it is the Word of Almighty God, it is Unique. Therefore, since the Holy Bible is the Word of God, we must conclude that  it is completely Trustworthy in all that it speaks on. That is, the Bible in its  original languages (autographs), are 100% without any error, in every respect, even down to the very fine points of grammar. To the very dot. (all Scripture [Old and New Testaments - ONLY the 66 books, as in the King James Version] is inspired by God) The Holy Bible, as the Word of God, is completely Inerrant on all subjects that it speaks on. We reject as demonic heresy, any suggestion that the Bible can be trusted in matters relating to faith and salvation, but not on matters on science, history, etc. Those who hold such a view, which is sometime called, “Limited Inerrancy“, have been deceived be the enemy of the Faith, and must be rejected as heresy. For anyone to even hint that the Bible contains errors in the original, are directly contradicting God Himself, and have made Him out to be a liar, since He  is then guilty of giving us false information in His Word. This, of course is an impossibility!

You know, I hate it when people hold back.  I wish these folks would have told us what they really thought. -P 

It was surprising to see people who are offering such a good ammount of scholarship as holding such a fundy position on inerrancy.  Now for the most part, the majority of the scholars whose books they provide are inerrantists, and that’s fine.  But I didn’t think that would equate to this kind of ridiculous assertion that (1) the doctrine of the Scriptures is the most important in Christianity, and (2) that those who don’t affirm inerrancy in matters of history or science are heretics.  But I guess you live and you learn. 

Like my pastor says, “eat the meat and spit the bones out.”  You can get a lot of good material on the site, just don’t look to them when your formulating your stance on the nature of Scripture. ;)

B”H

Responses

Hey Nick,

I know I read that somewhere on the site, but I think I did what I normally do when I come across those statements “whatever”, I went straight to the source to see what was available.

Plus their association with the KJV, was odd, but hey “whatever”, they have some good sources on-line. ;-)

Hey, the KJV is God’s inspired Word preserved perfectly, free from all error, in his universal language of English. It makes perfect sense that they’d associate themselves with it. :-P

Do they have the right to charge people for materials they have scanned? Did they get permission from each publisher to do so? There are ethical questions here. Is it right to use materials that are of uncertain provenance?

All of this was the subject of extensive discussion years ago.

Jim,

Those are very good questions. I had assumed that they had the rights to these materials. I guess that would merit further investigation, although I wouldn’t want to see such a site shut down. I find it extremely convenient.

When this site came live in 2005 we investigated a bit and found out from various publishers that the site had NO rights to make use of many of the resources which were then (and are now) still protected by copyright.

Though my old blog was retired and the postings Michael links to no longer exist- I can assure you- we looked into this precisely because of the ethical issues involved and a concensus among we bibliobloggers (back when there were only a couple of dozen) decided corporately to avoid it.

Jim,

Good to know. I wonder how it is that they’re still up and running. And from reading Michael’s post, it seems like at the time the material was free. Was it? Or did they charge back then as well?

It was free then; and again, when we asked several of the publishers who had materials hijacked they denied granting any sort of permission.

I’m surprised they haven’t been sued.

My understanding is that it is still free here is a quote from their site:

“Although we do have a very small charge for membership, we do also provide a free option for anyone who cannot afford to pay. Paid membership is not a requirement for anyone, and is done so by choice.”

And they have this disclaimer:

“It is important to remember that the Bible Centre is a Reference Library. This means that you cannot download or copy entire works, but need to comply with the Copyright laws on the limits on use.You can copy up to 10% of a work. If you are in any doubt, please contact us first.”

This does not answer the question, if what they are doing is legal, but I think that at some point there must be way to legally offer a digital library website.

I work for IBM, I’ll do an internal search of our website and see if they have any information regarding this subject.

Robert,

The digital library take is an interesting one. I mean we can read all of these books for free from a public library, so what’s the real difference? I suppose they could design the site so that nothing can be copied and downloaded. If that were the case then I wouldn’t see what the problem would be.

I’d be very interested to hear what you find out at work. Keep me posted.

Nick,

I have some books on PDF’s but to be honest, I prefer to have a book. I like holding them, and turning the pages, and reading them of course. So I only use the digital format for reference. I can’t read a book on line for too long because it just hurts my eyes.

IBM has a contract with 24/7 books. Internally we have access to just about every single recent technology book that has ever been written. They are on-line, and we can read and print. I think a on-line library would be at some cost in order to pay for the service. Unless the government does it, but I would rather it be in private hands.

Robert,

I feel the exact same way — there’s nothing like a good book!

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