The Bible According to Ray, part 2

After a great deal of thought, I finally conceded that Ray might be onto something when he says that Scripture is inerrant in faith AND morals.

At first I wanted to say that the distinction is absurd. We saw in the last post that every area Scripture is inerrant is ipso facto talking about a matter of faith, so how can Ray separate out another area of biblical inerrancy? If we take “morals” to mean “what we must believe about morality”, which is a subheading of “what we must believe”, which is the same thing as the area called “faith”, then Ray’s distinction is just nonsense.

But then I saw a way out. It could be that “faith” refers to what we must believe, while “morals” refers to what we must do. Hang with me, here. It could be that “morals” does not refer to Scripture saying “the moral thing to do is X” but to Scripture saying “Do X.” The first case would be something we must believe, while the second case would be something we must do, and Scripture could have authority with regard to both.

Of course, we do tend to associate the word “inerrant” with propositions that are either true or false. If someone said something erroneous, our first thought is that he said something false; if someone is said to be inerrant, our first thought is that he says things that are true. And if “Scripture is inerrant” refers only to statements that are true or false, then that kinda slams the door on my “way out”.

Two things incline me to believe that my “way out” is the right way to go. First, the idea of “error” is broad enough to include bad advice. If someone says “the moral thing to do is X” when the moral thing to do is not-X, we can say that he “erred” in the broader sense of going in the wrong direction. He “steered me wrong”, as the saying goes.

Second, Ray Moose just isn’t smart enough to be wrong 100% of the time. It would take a genius. He’s bound to be right once in a while. And as we’ll see in the upcoming posts, I just can’t find anywhere else where he even might be right on this issue, so I figure this must be it!